Hidden City | Project Program | Synthesis Wheel | Connected Places | Musical Order
Biological Function | Technological Function | Civic Themes | Newark Objects
Street Collages| Street Sections | Great Map | Conclusion

HIDDEN CITY

The contemporary history of American cities is a traumatic one in which Newark has a longstanding place. The conviction hold by many that the city can not be made to function properly has led to an ongoing exodus to the suburbs. In it merely out of habit or the constraints of circumstance that we who are left continue to live here? Or, is there something about Newark that makes it different from all other places - something that we are barely aware of perhaps, but cling to - that sets us apart from all others.

An examination of the multitude of precincts and objects in Newark discloses something of the nature of the individuals who live here. who shape the place and are shaped by it, The Hidden City Project is founded on the idea that the way of life and the articulations of the place itself are things with which we identify - a symbolic city to be discovered and built upon as a way of holding our place in the world.

The Project starts with an 'archaeology' of the city; an uncovering and gathering together of images of the world of Newark that tries to trace their pattern of meaning. A 'mythology' of Newark is revealed in the accretion and synthesis of the symbolic fragments to be found in its places, constructions and mechanisms. Taken as a whole. this myth of the city is like the life of a person; an ongoing agglomeration of experiences aspirations, glories, humors and outrages suffered vicariously by us all.

If this hidden identity of Newark exists, how can we go about disclosing it? The method of the project is to look at the city in the way you would look at Yourself. There are many different levels of reality You experience: the internal systems of your body; your individual variations of appearance and attire; culinary, literary, musical and artistic pursuits; technical ability. and so on. For each of us. these realities interact with each other and are intimately bound up with our changing, growing sense of self in relation to the world around us; our social standing, personality, neuroses, and habits of thought and conviction.

The Project goes on to expose this same type of relationship in the hidden life of Newark, through the use of 'collage.' The process of combining diverse images of the appearance and workings of the city exposes underlying patterns and metaphors. The symbolic order thus created can reveal our particular ways of seeing and making our world in general - its systems and its artifacts. This work presents the life of Newark; a life which, like our own persons, contains the seeds of our way of apprehending the world at large.

The exposure of Newark's identity has a political aspect. It is still possible to see this in the remains of a language of symbolic architecture created in earlier times and throughout the public realm an a sort of shared image of the City. Today this image is not one in which everyone participates. If Newark is to maintain its identity as an individual place and a people, it must find the means to express the shared experience and view of the world of its modern population. To this end, the Hidden City Project proposes the creation of objects and architectural constructions of a now type - 'monuments' to the various city neighborhoods - to be built along the paths of 16 streets In the center of town. Each is to embody a particular pattern appropriate to the life of the City today.

PROJECT PROGRAM Back to Top

The Hidden City Project presents the program for a now expression of Newark's nature and place in the world, to be instated in tile environment of the city. The principal idea behind this program is the symbolic gathering together of the various neighborhoods and environments with their unique dispositions into a representation of the whole of the city: The Hidden City of Newark. To achieve this the project proposes a program for the building of objects and architectural constructions 'monuments' to each of the localities - Into the fabric of the city along 16 streets in a specific Project Zone.

Images relating to the nature of the life of Newark are collected on the Synthesis Wheel. The 16 Street Collages each present a graphic program for the construction of monuments representing the nature of 16 unique neighborhoods. These programs are further expressed in the Street Writings associated with each college. Certain colors and nicknames are also associated with each street and its adopted neighborhood. All these ideas, images and places associated with each part of the project are listed systematically in the Project Index. The Project Zone is represented in the Street Sections. The Great Map of Newark also shows the Project Zone and how the Street Collages relate to the project sites.

The 'monumental' constructions are forseen in a variety of media Including "assemblage' structures, street mosaic and architectural proposals. The design process is open to and solicits public input.

THE SYNTHESIS WHEEL Back to Top

The discovery that certain artifacts and pieces can stand as representatives of the various microcosms in the life of Newark encourages us to see these objects as pieces of a puzzle that we can try to assemble.

Statues and spoons and freeway ramps. Airplanes and lamp posts and chimneys. Clocks and angels and saxophones.

The Synthesis Wheel appropriates images of places and things in the city and displays them as emblems of various interacting worlds of physical reality which are Symptomatic of the intangible life of the whole.

The rings of the Synthesis Wheel are used to gather these disparate elements together into families. An the word 'microcosm' implies, each family acts as a different type of metaphor for Newark as a whole. From the center:

A city of connected Places
A city of musical order
A city of biological function
A city of technological function
A city of civic themes
A city of Newark objects

In operation the Synthesis Wheel is a computer or an astrological instrument bringing these independent worlds together so that we may view them as interacting systems. By moving the rings of the wheel to juxtapose different images,conventional meanings are dislocated. An image on one ring interacts with the elements of another, synthesizing a chain of new associations. By making radial alignments of elements from each of the systems, we establish a range of the different , possible aspects of the personality of the city.

A CITY OF CONNECTED PLACES Back to Top

William Pitt declared the parks of London to be "the lunge of the city". Ideas mapped out by the synthesis wheel suggest that individual neighborhoods can be associated with geometry or wind Instruments. We can discover "the brain" or "the transistors of Newark." If we look at the places and artifacts of the city an representatives of aspects of ourselves and our endeavors, we begin to see that a how geography is needed to map its significant contours. All through history the ordering of places on the earth has involved the marking out of figures and geometries which personify the landscape. These figures have a significant and a character giving order to the world of their creators. The Hidden City Project tries to interpret the geography of Newark in this way and ultimately goes on to propose the building of these images back into the fabric of the city in strategic ways.

A CITY OF MUSICAL ORDER Back to Top

All sounds that we hear have implications in our experience of the world. They compel threaten or comfort us in their familiarity or strangeness - Yet only those sounds uttered by living creatures are sold to have a voice, and of these the human voice is supreme in its ability to conjure up a multitude of moods and dispositions. In song or speech. the human voice can describe whole worlds of distinct personalities through its tonal range and expression. Musical instruments themselves offer a way of externalizing and solidifying these individual tonal characters; for their unique form, range and usage lend them the semblance of peculiar beings. This ability to mimic the living, gives instruments voice and purpose. Alone, or Interacting with other voices they can produce a view of the world in images of sound. Taken all together their images represent a microcosm of the world as a whole.

Like voices continually sounding, the various places and precincts of Newark have their own characters and moods musical voices, political voices, domestic voices. If we examine each neighborhood, to discover the form and voice of its personality. we find that a sort of music is implied by each one. Taken together, they are the instruments of the orchestra of the city.

A CITY OF BIOLOGICAL FUNCTION Back to Top

Newark is a body.

In the human anatomy there is a unity of structure and function needed to sustain life. Yet the unity of the body has implications far beyond this, for we perpetually use the immediacy of the various articulations of the body as a means of knowing and ordering the environment around us. When we give someone directions saying 'left,' 'right', 'front' or 'back'; or when we speak of the 'neck' of a bottle or 'the heart of the matter'; we are using our own form as a microcosm of the world. Moreover, a person's posture, gestures and the allurements and codes of intention in personal dress conspire to communicate one's attitudes and personality, whether intentional or not. In this way we use the body an a vehicle which mediates between our consciousness, desires and intentions, and the world outside ourselves.

The city is a body in that it occupies this same intermediate location. We orient and condition our movements to its articulatons, and adopt its social, commercial and governmental organs and infrastructures as our own. The city is a microcosm, collecting and ordering the goods, institutions and personae of the world at large. And again, like the human body, the body of the city cannot help but reveal something of our nature as a people. Within the body of Newark there is an accretion of architectures and artifacts which symbolically project a multitude of images of our collective identity.

A CITY OF TECHNOLOGICAL FUNCTION Back to Top

The tools and implements by which we fabricate our existence all have their origin in projections of the organs of the body. The hammer and the computer are extensions and externalizations of the fist and the brain. In this light we might expect then to take on, between ourselves and the outside world, a mediating position similar to that of the body itself. Yet there in, a certain equivocation in this relationship. These technological creatures take on an implacability and strange contours as we form them to manipulate the objects and systems of the natural world. Technology then, in-its character as a double of ourselves. tends to rebound and cast its unforseen implications back onto us. There is a tension between man and machine. Yet this tension cannot be;dispensed with, but rather is the condition through which our inward nature becomes known to us, and in which our relations with the world of nature around us is revealed.

The articulations of the city manifest this symbiotic relationship at every scale from the door handle on City Hall to its' regional systems of circulation. In Newark these projections from the mundane to the grandiose contrive to form an urban ecosystem which may at times be opaque to our gaze; but which become the vehicle of our communal experience - infiltrating our consciousness, desires and intentions and coming to stand for us, in and apart from the rest of the world.

A CITY OF CIVIC THEMES Back to Top

Technological advances in communications and transportation have created a freedom of movement unknown in previous times. Employees can live far from their factories and offices and industries need not be near their suppliers and distributors. Indeed, it would seem that in the future there will be no need at all for urban centers like Newark.

Yet functional interdependence among the various activities of life has never been the sole basis of urbanism. The city comes together when people share a vision of the nature of the world and how to live in it. This shared vision of the city is an active mythology. It drawn outside things into its sphere and bakes possession of them in its unique articulations. At the same time this mythology illuminates our own nature. As with all mythic activity, there is a continually evolving process of interaction which forms us as we give it form. Historically, aspects of Newark's mythology have been its original role as a theocracy in the 17th century, as a city of extraordinary technological invention in the 19th century, and as a booming center of commerce and finance in-the 20th century. The vestiges of these mythic roles are still evident In every aspect of the environment of the city. The civic themes of the Project are agents for a modern mythology of Newark. For If Newark Is to fulfill the promise of its purported 'Renaissance' it must continue to engage its evolution in the interaction of its people, institutions, and physical environment.

A CITY OF NEWARK OBJECTS Back to Top

Objects, through their contact with man, acquire a history and an intimacy which lends them a significance greater than their usefulness or aesthetic appearance. This experience is most clear when we encounter the unfamiliar object; for instance, when we travel to a foreign city. Even the most banal objects such as the hardware used to support telephone cables, or metal trash baskets an the street appear to bear strange personalities which, to the travelers seem as indicative of the culture they represent as do the buildings of the city with all their obscure emblems and icons. This same phenomenon is true for Newark, with the difference that, to Its own inhabitants, familiar or seemingly banal objects and places activate their sense of identity in a more subconscious way. An industrial neighborhood may gain a distinct identity from the presence of a pair of tall smokestacks. A residential street may retain an almost palpable flavoring from the proximity of a series of abandoned railway trestle's. We cannot possess or define the precise nature of these images, for they are the result of simultaneously projecting our desire and imagination onto our surroundings, and receiving back the signal of their reflected image. A process of personification takes place in which the object and the locals with which it associates itself take on a particular disposition. In this way certain objects can come to stand for different aspects of the nature of the city and of ourselves. If we could assemble these objects from throughout the city, we could discover the complex personality of Newark itself.

STREET COLLAGES Back to Top

The art of physiognomy is the study of the outward appearance or face of things as an Index to their inner character. The Street Collages have used a process of Physiognomy to study the character of Newark, with its various small worlds and precincts.

The study began by associating localities in the city with the different urban images of the Synthesis Wheel. A variety of radial alignments resulted in certain Wheel Segments that seemed to indicate a cohesive personality associating itself with a particular place - a personality able to establish itself across the several microcosms of the city to display a single unifying disposition. Each of these personalities has a formal and an anatomical aspect, a technical side, a musical and a civic persuasion. The continuation of this process suggested a particular index of character for 16 different neighborhoods and environments on which each collage is based. The 16 Street Collages, taken together, represent the entire person of Newark in all its complexity.

STREET SECTIONS Back to Top

Downtown Newark, the physical and political center of the city, has been chosen as the proper location for the Hidden City Project. Within this Project Zone each neighborhood or environment will have the Oath of one of 16 parallel streets as the site for its representation. The Street Sections profile these project sites through downtown Newark each one corresponding to a particular Street Collage. Each Section represents a cut through the length of the street (or. in some cases, through the middle of city blocks) to reveal the topography of the site. Intersecting streets are represented in code along the sides of the profiles. Taken all together, the 16 Sections constitute a three dimensional topography of the downtown Project Zone.

THE GREAT MAP OF NEWARK Back to Top

The Great Map Of Newark presents a graphic description of our program to discover and build the Hidden City of Newark in the urban environment.

The Great Map contains two layers of information. The first layer is a map of Newark at a scale or 111-4001, with each of the neighborhoods and environments shown in its own color. The two Neighborhoods shown in gold and silver comprise the 'central core' of the city, and constitute the downtown Project Zone. The paths of 16 streets - the sites for projects are shown in red. The second layer is a map of the Project Zone,in which the 16 streets are shown in collage form, at a scale of 1"=100! along with the footprints of adjacent buildings.

Each of the Street collages is the program and source material for,the proposed 'monumental' constructions. Thus the design of the constructions themselves in to reveal the individual personalities and resonances of the neighborhoods and environments of the city first discovered In the collage process. In this way the Hidden City becomes a gathering of all the various aspects of Newark. giving each of the localities its own representation in the symbolic coming together of the city.

CONCLUSION Back to Top

For us. the task of architecture and urban design is to mediate between the mundane existence of everyday life and at broader vision of mankind in the world as a whole. The Hidden City ProJect presents a Newark mythology which augments and builds upon a vision of the city which seems to already exist in its places and artifacts, but which remains undisclosed and unsung. With out the public assertion of its nature and place in the world today. the fabric of the city is reduced to the mechanics and cosmetics of its amenities- the population disembodied of its Identity. A discovery of the underlying identity of Newark, and a way to express and augment this identity is required in order to ensure that the people of the city will have a dwelling which represents them as citizens rather than tenants. To acheive this goal of a representational city we must recognize the underpinnings of the identity we hold in common, seeing Newark as a place which expresses, through its indiginous artifacts and articulations, our own way of ordering and expressing the nature of the world we live in.