Lower Manhattan

America's Foundation: click to enlarge

In Ian Frazier first essay from Gone To New York titled "Antipodes", he discusses what exists below the Earth's surface beneath New York and other part of the world. He describes the vast oceans that cover the majority of the planet and the infinitely deep trenches that we have barely been able to explore. It is an intriguing and overwhelming question to ponder what lies below our feet. A recent article from New Scientist describes what is probably the most ambitious seismological project ever conducted. Its called USArray. Its goal is to essentially conduct an ultrasound scan across North America. If it succeed it will generate an unprecedented 3D picture of what lies beneath the continent.

The New Scientist article describes the project: "It is a mammoth undertaking, during which USArray's scanner - a set of 400 transportable seismometers - will sweep all the way from the Pacific to the Atlantic. Having started off in California in 2004, it is now just east of the Rockies covering a north-south swathe stretching from Montana's border with Canada down past El Paso on the Texas-Mexico border. By 2013, it should have reached the north-east coast, and its mission end."

For such a fundamental idea as what lies beneath our feet, our general understanding is extremely limited. The current theory of plate tectonics was only developed in the 1960s. This theory supposes that the Earth's crust, or lithosphere, is divided into a number of crustal plates resembling jigsaw puzzle pieces, each of which moves on the plastic asthenosphere (the region below the lithosphere) more or less independently to collide with, slide under, or move past adjacent plates. These enormous plates carry entire continents and chunks of ocean and are constantly moving. When two plates collide one often dives beneath the other. That process, known as subduction, can create forces strong enough to build up spectacular mountain ranges such as the still-growing Andes in South America or the Rocky mountains of the western US and Canada.

But there is still much that we don't about during these slow transitions beneath the Earth surface that have been occurring for millions of years. How exactly does the path deep underground relate to features we can see on the surface?

Le Corbusier once remarked that New York's skyscrapers are too small. Most New Yorker's thought this meant that they weren't tall enough, that they needed to be built higher. He was referring to the ground plan being too small, however. Manhattan is a dense compacted city. For many decades it has been the biggest, the tallest, and the best. But New York is no longer able to compete in terms of size with future cities such as Shanghai for example.

In 1999 Abitare magazine published a special issue devoted to New York City, where they asked several architects to make some sort of comment about New York. Lebbeus Woods made a drawing of Manhattan with both the East River and the Hudson drained. He wanted to suggest "that maybe lower Manhattan – not lower downtown, but lower in the sense of below the city – could form a new relationship with the planet. So, in the drawing, you see that the East River and the Hudson are both dammed. They’re purposefully drained, as it were. The underground – or lower Manhattan – is revealed, and, in the drawing, there are suggestions of inhabitation in that lower region."

Lower Manhattan: by Lebbeus Woods, Abitare Magazine 1999

I have always been struck by this image and consider it a profound notion. Seeing the depth and scale of the planet that we walk on, even in a conceptual drawing is overwhelming. Similar to the impact of witnessing the spectacular depth of the Grand Canyon, we are forced to confront our own scale and relationship to the Earth. Recent natural disasters have reminded us that nature is still a force to be reckoned with. Man is only part of much larger systems, and the part can never control the whole. If we want to continue our civilizations existence on this planet we are going to have to rethink and reconsider our relationship to the natural environment. Perhaps understanding the composition of the planet will open up a new realm for exploration and future inhabitation.