Pop-Up City(es)

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Carlos Ignacio Hernández, VC 2013, presented his Urban Studies thesis in the Library’s courtyard this week.  The Library was happy to provide Carlos with the space for his installation and event. Below is his description of his work.

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My project is titled Pop-Up City(es). It is located in the Art Library Courtyard at Vassar College, a normally deserted space with no real sociability or programmatic qualities. With this in mind, this project aimed to occupy the space with a temporary structure that “pops up” and activates the precinct. A wooden frame made out of birch supports a perforated pegboard roof. Through the orifices of the board, synthetic string pieces make their way from top to bottom, conforming proportionally almost all of the structure’s negative space. On the sides of the structure, timelapse projections of four cities relevant to me and my life are shown. Caracas where I was born, Hong Kong where I went to high school, Copenhagen where I studied the sleek angles of Scandinavian architecture, and New York City, a metropolis in which I’ve spent a considerable amount of time and as a result of the lack of timelapse videos of Poughkeepsie that were available online.

Georg Simmel wrote on the urban experience and stated that the IMG_0966 smaller“psychological foundation upon which the metropolitan individuality is erected is the intensification of emotional life due to the swift and continuous shift of external and internal stimuli.” (Simmel, Metropolis and Mental Life). I wanted to work with simulation of the idea of the city blasé attitude that fills our sidewalks and the replication of an urban journey that was overwhelming and over stimulating in visual terms.

The class session on Diller + Scofidio’s Blur Building was equally pivotal in the creative stages of this process. For the architects, when architecture is dematerialized and equated to the dubious, Blur becomes an experiment in the construction of de-emphasis and media becomes physically tangible. Pop-Up City(es) aims to contest the space-building process through barriers or walls.IMG_0970 smaller Instead, the switch in physicality between the “barrier” and the inside emphasizes the negative space inside the suprasensorial structure. Like the Blur Building, my installation is “a habitable medium” and is meant to generate a sense of curiosity in the spectator and invite her/him to explore and interact with the project in order act against the mobility of image/immobility of spectator dichotomy that Friedberg introduces in her book The Virtual Window.

Brenner and Schmid’s Planetary Urbanisation manifesto brought ideas about international urban connections and transnationalism:

The creation of new scales of urbanization. Extensively urbanized interdependencies are being consolidated within extremely large, rapidly expanding, polynucleated metropolitan regions around the world to create sprawling “urban galaxies” that stretch beyond any single metropolitan region and often traverse multiple national boundaries.

Pop-Up City(es) is a city made out of cities. Through the timelapse projections of cityscapes around the world, this project aimed to comment on the global urban hierarchy and interdependence of cities around the planet, that grow as extensions of each other as a result of agglomerated urbanization. You can enter the structure on the Hong Kong side and exit through Caracas, or vice versa.

In Beatriz Colomina’s piece titled Enclosed by Images, the following introductory statement is made:

We are surrounded today, everywhere, all the time, by arrays of multiple, simultaneous images. The idea of a single image commanding our attention has faded away. It seems as if we need to be distracted in order to concentrate. As if we-all of us living in this new kind of space, the space of information–could be diagnosed en masse with Attention Deficit Disorder. The state of distraction in the metropolis, described so eloquently by Walter Benjamin early in the twentieth century, seems to have been replaced by a new form of distraction, which is to say a new form of attention. Rather than wandering cinematically through the city, we now look in one direction and see many juxtaposed moving images, more than we can possibly synthesize or reduce to a single impression.

The combination of elements of this piece (a frame filled with strings, projected images and interaction with the spectator) make it a combination of the ideas mentioned above, which Colomina carefully articulates so well.

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Audubon at Vassar

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Posted on behalf of Ron Patkus, Director of Archives and Special Collections

roseate spoonbill

One of the most talked-about exhibitions in New York this spring has been the New York Historical Society’s Audubon’s Aviary: Part I of The Complete Flock.  The show is the first of a three-part series which presents the preparatory watercolors John James Audubon produced for his masterpiece The Birds of America (1827-1838).  Altogether there are 433 of these watercolors, which represent a high point in American natural history and art.

Audubon collaborated first with the Scottish engraver William Lizars and then with the English engraver Robert Havell to create and sell by subscription the large hand-colored prints for The Birds of America.  Subscribers received five prints at a time over a period of years.  We do not know exactly how many sets were created, but today a little more than 100 survive in their entirety, mostly on the campuses of colleges and universities in the United States, including Vassar.   They are referred to as “double-elephant folios,” because of their great size.

Louisiana and Scarlet TanagersThe original owner of Vassar’s set was probably John William Clough of York, England (1773-1843).  We know that either he or his son (who was also named “John”), was an early subscriber to Audubon’s work.  On the back of some of the plates in the Vassar set appears the name “J. Clough,” which may have been written by the bookbinder as a note to himself about the owner.  It has been surmised that the Clough family sold its copy during the financial crisis of 1879; a note in pencil in the first volume indicates that with another of Audubon’s works, the set sold for $1,800.  In any case, Vassar received the set in 1897 as a gift from New Yorker Charles Senff, a well-known figure in the American sugar trade.  Senff was a major contributor to the fund which established the Audubon memorial in Trinity Cemetery, Washington Heights.

Additional evidence of the early state of Vassar’s set is provided by the first plate, which features the heading “Great American Cock” (later printings used only “Wild Turkey”).  Further, the paper of the first plates features an early watermark of the Whatman mill.  The plates are bound into four volumes; the first three each have 100 plates, and the fourth one has 135.  The binding is half morocco, with gilt decoration, and marbled endpapers.

The greatest scholar of the Audubon prints has been Waldemar H. Fries, who wrote an important reference work titled The Double-Elephant Folio: the Story of Audubon’s Birds of America.    Interestingly, Fries’ wife, Elizabeth, was a member of Vassar’s Class of 1921; she funded the purchase of the first display cases for Vassar’s Audubon folios.  The cases were presented in the fall of 1974, and on the occasion of the dedication, Mr. Fries gave a talk about the folios in the library.

Scarlet Ibis

Conservation work on Vassar’s set was performed in New York City in 1977 by Carolyn Horton and Associates.  A full listing of the repairs is tipped into the back of volume one.  The conservation work included treating the leather, putting down scuffs, cleaning all of the plates, and mending those that needed it.

In addition to The Birds of America, the Archives & Special Collections Library is fortunate to possess several other works relating to Audubon.  For instance, we have his 5-volume Ornithological Biography, also donated by Charles Senff, which was a text accompaniment to the original prints.  Moreover, we have a first edition of the octavo version of Birds of America, published in 1839.  The library also owns a first edition of another important, though more-neglected, work of Audubon, called The Quadrupeds of North America.   Other books for further reading are available in Archives & Special Collections, the Main Library, and the Art Library.