Water Week

During the New School’s Water Week, in March 2011, students in Waterlogged and Restoration Ecology classes lead tours tracing the paths of three buried streams: Minetta Brook, Sun Fish Pond and Collect Pond and Stream. Along the way, the students presented their research on the history of the waterways, the impacts these streams and the surrounding geography have had on urban forms, and restoration case studies.

A PDF of the booklet they created for the tours is available to download here.

Sun Fish Pond Tour






Minetta Brook Tour








Collect Pond and Stream Tour








The tours ended where each stream once connected to the river.

Eva's Prints

Lincoln Road Prints

Rena Lee - prints!

Parallel sidewalks border a road flowing towards a turning point at the end of a narrow street, congested with cars looking for diverse cuisines on either side. Aimed at the same general direction is the elevated path of the LIRR. Riders and pedestrians criss-cross to and from the same points within their bounded paths, while simultaneously creating shifting boundaries for cars and for each other. Repetitive sounds of train tracks, car engines, station announcements are interrupted by occasional street chatter and loud heels on the cement and cobblestone pavement. The point of convergence seems to be beyond a brand-new development called “NEW WORLD MALL”. This narrow street is not ready for more people as cars and pedestrians barely navigate past each other now without brushing, but relentless commercial development projects are slated for the coming years. The interactions between paths are slated to become chaotic, overrun by traffic, not only at the intersection of Prince Street and 40^th Rd, but throughout this lovely little town called Flushing.

converge     diverge      intersect      restrain      release      meander      fade

Moving from the bottom up towards the right, a gradual increase in darkness and openness can be seen. The congestion of cars and pedestrians is most extreme in the large plate, where there is hardly any white space left and the leaves imprinted by soft ground overlap and touch each other, as well as the boundaries set by the pedestrians criss-crossing on sidewalks. The paths of people constantly jay-walking across the congested streets is shown by the splotchy flows of sugar-lift, increasingly sporadic and heavily-used as the restricting dominance of cars decreases though there’s always a residue of sounds and soot. The resulting plates were not what I had in mind really; every iteration brought unexpected prints with varying lights and darks due to experimenting with pressures and etching times as well as mixing up plate placements. It was really a process of seeing how different methods of etching interacted over iterations and since my original goal was to show interactions of paths and boundaries, with people meandering like water through the streets, there was lots of uncertainty in what results would come of these many interactions. Overall, I’m satisfied with the final plates and prints (but I’ll probably layer on more outside of class to experiment more with sugar lift and aquatint).

converge      intersect      overlay     redirect      weave      meander      release 

Erica Schapiro-Sakashita's Prints

Mikaela Kvan's prints

Hannah Kramm Print Series

.......The location this series is inspired by is the Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn......

I would like to experiment with a series of three small plates arranged horizontally but with space between. These will be registered off one another and printed on single pass through the press as one image. The spaces between the plates can serve as a metaphor for the passing of time, and of hidden elements that get forgotten with history, as well as a reference to the physical, as bridges spanning a body of water separating it into sections.

The printing process is similar to geological time, layers corrosion and wear make a complete image after the many steps of process line up on top of eachother. This series focuses the concepts of Wear, Erosion, Accumulation, Trapping and Scraping, because of the endless flow and motion over a surface of water through time.

Brooklyn Bridge Park Printmaking

The Brooklyn Bridge Park consisted of many different textures. Since it is a spot where concrete, stones, the water, wind, trains and planes get combined, I thought it would be a rich area for observations. In terms of geometry, I think using undefined shapes and lines would imitate the movements I saw and felt in the site. For example, wave lines and maybe punctured holes can help me express the wind and the water. Words that may describe my site can be: erode, disrupt, and overlay. Below are three prints from my process of printmaking based on my sketch of what I observed in Brooklyn Bridge Park.

During my printmaking process, I tried to focus on the words that I chose before I started. I feel like the idea of eroding came through on my plate because the more I added on, the more "noise" I felt was created. More texture was implanted, and my plate's surface started to barely feel smooth anymore. Since I focused on noise when I first drew the sketch during the first phase of this project, I felt like the "distractions" I wanted to show actually came through on my plate. A new set of words that may describe my new plate is:

Erode
Erase [the peace from the first printing phase]

Decompose
Disrupt
Invade
Disperse
Fill

Colin - Broad St. Canal Narrative

BROAD ST. CANAL

Iteration 1:

Broad Street has a strong slope downwards to the river. Above is a ceiling of randomly lighted windows. Out to the East River is the only real opening to the sky and is where people disappear into and where cars appear out of. Upon approaching the water, the street hits a horizontal of traffic. The various layers include both cars on South St. and those entering the South St. Viaduct, bikes and pedestrians, and even helicopters flying in over the East River.

Words:

• gravitate
• stain
• slope
• burrow
• constrain
• flow
• negate

...

Iteration 2:

Much of my process in printmaking revolved around setting down hard-ground, and then either using sugar lift, or gamsol to soften, break apart, and manipulate the surface. With gamsol on hard-ground, I was able to work with various gravities — manipulating ‘water’ flow by either turning and tilting the plate or by setting up constraints that directed flower more specifically. This process left the determining gravity (the orientation of the print) open to interpretation. Eventually through my process I was able to return to the site of Broad St. A strong diagonal composition was created through my process and I did various etchings with the needle to bring the abstract closer to a representational view of the site. At the bottom I saw forms of water (either East River or underground stream) so placed a shadow of the grating over this area. I observed this at the site; through gratings I could see the water of the stream. The middle-ground of the plate for me acted as an in-between, the space underneath the wedge of the hill. The upper part of the plate would act as the little bit of space for the ‘sky.’

It was interesting that the process went from the representational (observations of the site) to abstract (process of printmaking) and then back to the representational.

Words: (from list of vocabulary)

• erode
• divert
• displace
• redirect
• constrain
• reflect
• disperse
• flush
• duplicate
• pool
• overlay

Colin - 3 Etching Stages

Movement in the City

After having sketched some observations at Cooper Square, I noticed that there are many layers of movement that are constantly weaving and intersecting with each other, while in flux. Traffic moves in more than one direction; people both follow flows and divert from them. Furthermore, these flows are regulated by disruptions otherwise known as traffic lights. In an effort to create prints that would be expressive of my observations, I chose to focus on these three words: intersect, divert, and disrupt. The etched actions on my plate are exaggerated versions of what I observed at Cooper Square.

Printmaking + Urban Flows

As a component of Waterlogged we used printmaking to explore ideas related to layering and flow in city conditions. The movement of elements—people, water, air, sound—create currents through the landscape that are changed and interrupted as they react to the physical disruptions created by city infrastructure. The prints are based on a series of urban observation drawings (previous posts) in which students documented these less representational elements of the landscape. These drawings served as an analogous departure point for altering the plates. The images emerged through the process of exploring conditions where flow and urban form collide.

pathways

For my pathways drawings I chose to sit at my window on the 11th floor and draw what was below me. I can hear faint sounds that reverberate between the buildings and wanted to examine what was below compared to the sky above.

Through the process of creating observation drawings from my window on the eleventh floor, I became increasingly fascinated by the multitude of separate paths created by humans, birds, and cars. At first it was quite daunting when I realized how many of these paths intersect with my own without any recognition or relation to the dimensionality of neighbors in my environment.   

Interested in exploring relations between separate yet similar paths ways outside of my window I chose to symbolically pattern the paths I had previously observed. These path makers were: people tromping through snowy sidewalks, cars sleepily parked and the birds that draped themselves through the cluster of apartment buildings.

After completing the couplet of etchings where I studied the paths of inhabitants I wanted to look closer at what caused these paths to made. In the clay slabs I made the first one to represent the contour of the land where my burried stream existed in 1609. Amazed at how different the mass of land looked as well as the dramatic amount of birds, plants and reptiles that occupied this land due to its abundant abilities. In my second clay slab I wanted to represent stacked layout of the area today as well as note the little amount of green space.

 For my final project I wanted to link all of my previous studies and interests in contrasting land use and path ways in order to house both. After researching the habitat of both 1609 and today, I decided to ease the dangerous paths for native birds in this area. Since this location is right by the FDR and surrounded by fenced in housing projects, there has been recent danger to the Wood duck when taking them across the roadway and to the East River. By creating these wooden housing complex near the waters edge these birds will no longer have to sacrifice safety as they are able to reclaim lost land with out displacing others.

Vacant Lot on 6th Ave

These drawings stem from a space I've been passing frequently, a lot in lower Manhattan overgrown with weeds. This particular day was quite windy, and what I saw was the motion that took place. The first drawing was an observation of ground movement. I saw flowing patterns in the topography of the snow, and I tried to explore that.

These were very quick sketches I did of the waterways I go over every day using NJ Transit. The first one is right after leaving Newark Penn Station, sitting on the left hand side of the train, and the second is right before pulling in to Secaucus station. It's usually very quiet on the train, the only noise coming from the tracks, and I wanted to use the windows as a frame, since I was viewing these sites from behind a window. The first one, the water was flowing outward, but in the second one, the water seems to have a light film of ice over it, and is still as far as I can tell from my post.