local code, spaces between places
The magazine CABINET wrote this:
Odd Lots: Revisiting Gordon Matta-Clark’s Fake Estates
In the early 1970s, Matta-Clark discovered that the City of New York periodically auctioned off improbably tiny and frequently inaccessible parcels of land created by zoning eccentricities. Fascinated by these spaces, he bought fifteen of them (fourteen in Queens, and one in Staten Island) for between $25 and $75 each, photographed them, and collated the photographs with the appropriate deeds and maps. He called the project Fake Estates.
- odd lots, fake states, gordon matta clark
Odd Lots: Revisiting Gordon Matta-Clark’s Fake Estates further documents and advances this seminal work, and accompanies Cabinet’s exhibition at the Queens Museum of Art and White Columns in New York. Included here are responses to Matta-Clark’s original artwork by twenty contemporary artists including Francis Alí¿s, Jimbo Blachly, Mark Dion, Sarah Oppenheimer, Dan Price, and Mierle Ukeles.
Odd Lots also provides the definitive Fake Estates history, thus adding new dimension to the scholarship on this important artistall within the spirit of collaboration and experimentation that marked Matta-Clark’s short but influential career.
And that project is associated to this one:
Nicholas de Monchaux & collaborators
Berkeley, CA
Natalia Echeverri, Liz Goodman, Benjamin Golder, Sha Hwang, Sara Jensen, David Lung, Shivang Patwa, Kimiko Ryokai, Thomas Pollman, Matthew Smith, Laurie Spitler
Proposal Location : Major US Cities with city-owned abandoned lots, including New York, Los Angeles, Chicago and Washington DC. Case study developed for San Francisco.
Local Code : Real Estates uses geospatial analysis to identify thousands of publicly owned abandoned sites in major US cities, imagining this distributed, vacant landscape as a new urban system. Using parametric design, a landscape proposal for each site is tailored to local conditions, optimizing thermal and hydrological performance to enhance the whole city“ší„í´s ecology“ší„í®and relieving burdens on existing infrastructure. Local Code“ší„í´s quantifiable effects on energy usage and stormwater remediation eradicate the need for more expensive, yet invisible, sewer and electrical upgrades. In addition, the project uses citizen participation to conceive a new, more public infrastructure as well „ší„í®a robust network of urban greenways with tangible benefits to the health and safety of every citizen.
