Chun Hua Catherine Dong, I Have Been There – New York — Didier Morelli, To Be There, or To Have Been There

[Fall 2022]

To Be There, or To Have Been There
By Didier Morelli

[Extract]

Here I want to add that the architecture does not solely permit such levels of comfort and discomfort, but also the body comportment – the body movements of men and women, whites, blacks, or otherwise racialized people – in these spaces also establish the phenomenal feel of the space as welcoming or forbidding.1

I have been there. I have visited most of these landmarks as both a resident of New York City and a tourist, usually sharing them with throngs of people. Many are beautiful, but others I consider grotesque in a strangely appealing way. I recognize the Astor Place Cube across from Cooper Union, the World Trade Center Transportation Hub, the Unisphere at Flushing Meadows-Corona Park, and the Bull of Wall Street. Together they are the greatest hits of the Big Apple, a twenty-first-century architectural, public art, and real estate development sightseeing tour. They are also an embodiment of Richard Florida’s “creative class” thesis, and my worry-free circulation in them is a symptom of my belonging to this gentrifying demographic…

1 Emily S. Lee, Living Alterities: Phenomenology, Embodiment, and Race (New York: SUNY Press, 2014), 147.

 

[ Complete issue, in print and digital version, available here: Ciel variable 120 – FIGURES OF AFFIRMATION ]
[ Complete article and more images, in digital version, available here: Chun Hua Catherine Dong, I Have Been There – New York — Didier Morelli, To Be There, or To Have Been There ]