Bronxy Bronx

This guy is a collaboration with Freestyle Collective about New York City in 2019; the project is influenced by depictions of Tokyo in Japanese animation and comics. I immediately thought about the opening spread of Shirow’s Ghost in the Shell, where he draws these huge arcology-like superstructures that look to sink the city into the ocean. But after doing some research about the current buildings being built in New York, and the plans for improving its neighborhoods, it became apparent that that “Tower of Babel” model wasn’t very realistic.

Although the assignment was more Kusanagi than Corbusier, I looked at a lot of early 20th century Modernist urban planning to see how well their visions of the future panned out, specifically the Radiant City. However, over the years the Modernist vision of spare, “honest” architecture has proven to be more imposing than liberating, and I thought that Le Corbusier’s vision was again, not very realistic.

But who’s to say that dreaming of utopias is a fool’s endeavor? There’s nothing inherently wrong with wishing for a better world, but it’s when these visions clash, as they often do, without giving or taking from each other, that they become dangerous.

So I decided to draw two differing views of “Neo-New York” and the individuals holding those views debating the realism of each other’s ideas. The guy sees his own brand of “Radiant City” with driverless, clean transit, and sprawling greenery retaking a lush, multi-layered urban space. The clean lines and transparency of the new Silvercup West complex breaks up the “canyon” effect in the city, offering spacious living for citizens to enjoy their technologically enhanced lives.

And then his counterpart argues that there won’t be a single pane of glass left in New York, after global warming brings up the coastlines and nations start to dissolve, as borderless entities wreak havoc amongst their financial institutions. Small groups band together and begin vicious low-intensity fighting for resources, while the carcasses of the old establishments, such as the proposed Freedom Tower, slowly crumble apart.