By now, we’re well attuned to the fact that urban spaces and architecture reflect the social conditions of a given time period, and therefore the changes in these spaces would reflect changes in the social environment. This has been exhibited first in Lefebvre’s excerpt, where in the first line he posits “(social) space is a (social) product”, and then goes on to elaborate on that. Additionally, it was presented visually in the form of photographs, architectural drawings, and books at the New York Historical Society. A theme that also became apparent from those images, is that the social environment can be assessed not just by what projects it does construct, but also by the ones that it doesn’t. A couple examples are the plan to fill in the Hudson river or other waterways, as well as the drawing of the Washington bridge, both of which were not executed. As interesting as that topic is, however, it’s a lot easier to assess a social environment by what it does execute and build, and to draw conclusions from that.
I chose to investigate the changing conditions of New York City through the medium of film. I looked at a handful of different movies spanning from 1901 until 2016, including “What Happened on Twenty-third Street, New York City” (1901), “The Cameraman” (1928), “How to Marry a Millionaire” (1953), “Annie Hall” (1977), and “How to Be Single” (2016). When looking through the selected films, the architecture and general surroundings from the different time periods didn’t stick out to me as that different. In fact, the background in “What Happened on Twenty-third Street, New York City” reminded me very much of lower Manhattan as it looks today. Sure, the use of horse drawn chariots is definitely outdated, and the style of clothing has also certainly changed, but in terms of the buildings themselves, they didn’t seem that different. I would even bet that a lot of those exact buildings are still around today.
It was only after pointedly thinking about what differences there could be between all these different time periods that I thought of something that exists in the city now that didn’t back then: the luxury high riser, an image of a sleek, glass, modern luxury apartment or office complex. A lot of the buildings existent during 1901 and 2016 are the same, or at least stylistically the same, but at some point, there came to be more and more developments of sky scrapers, and buildings with a more modern style.
You can see this through a progression of snapshots from the movies.
What Happened on Twenty-third Street, New York City
The Cameraman
How to Marry a Millionaire
Annie Hall
How to Be Single
The only question left to answer is what does this shift in architectural style say about where society is heading? Paul Goldberger, in his article “What Has Architecture to Do With the Quality of Life?” from the New York Times, tries to answer a similar question, as the title would suggest. At the beginning, he posits that “Architecture is an effect of culture as much as a cause; it reflects our values at least as much as it creates them”. In other words, he says that architecture can tell us something about our society. So, in the case of modern sky scrapers, what can we learn? One of the perspectives Goldberger quotes in his article answers this question directly, which is that skyscrapers have led to “the loss of fine older buildings, the loss of sunlight, the loss of the kind of casual encounters that make urban life easy, the loss of small scale, the tendency of virtually everything to turn into an interior mall”. Now this may be a more pessimistic view of what modern architecture has wrought on (or reflected about) society, but it’s a view worth considering.
