Untimely Review: Traffic.
Phillip Denny
“Traffic,” Ricardo Scofidio and Elizabeth Diller, Columbus Circle, New York City, 1981.
Originally published in Issue No. 12
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In early May, Mayor Bill de Blasio announced New York City would temporarily pedestrianize up to one hundred miles of streets across the five boroughs in an effort to open up space for outdoor recreation during the pandemic. That decision, like many others made amid the coronavirus outbreak, was unprecedented in scale; it’s perhaps the most consequential planning move in recent memory. Photographs posted to social media have shown New Yorkers strolling through otherwise empty streets. These are glimpses of a future cityscape, one ruled not by the automobile, but rather handed over to its citizens. The street closures have brought to mind “Traffic,” a 1981 installation by Elizabeth Diller and Ricardo Scofidio at Columbus Circle in Manhattan, which saw 2,500 traffic cones arrayed in a socially distanced four-foot grid across six traffic islands. That twenty-four-hour project offered a fleeting vision of another city: one in which the wasted space of traffic was reclaimed. Appearing one morning and gone the next, the traffic cones transformed the city temporarily, in the words of the architects, “like a snowfall.” Changes to the rhythms and realities of urban life have come on like a blizzard since the outbreak began, but images like this one force us to ask: if this is what the new normal can be, then should we only try to go back to the way things were?
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Phillip Denny is an architecture critic and historian. He is a PhD student at Harvard University. His writing has appeared in Harvard Design Magazine, Volume, Metropolis, CLOG, PLAT and The New York Times. He holds a Master of Architecture degree from Princeton University, where he received the School of Architecture History and Theory Prize and the Certificate in Media + Modernity. He lives in New York City.
You can find him at: https://phillipdenny.com/
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