Proposal for Central Park
Time in a City Competition Entry, 2005
1. Desire and Time, in situ
Two concepts are used to transmute the notion of Time and City into the Accumulation
Monument- 1) Expansion of a thing within spherical space, and 2) the cobweb model used
in economics, whereby equilibrium is shown to be simultaneously dependent on time (to
create substance and value) and desirous of making it vanish.
2. Model and Plan
Embed the cobweb model in spherical space- does it move in space or in time? Is it an
object, a history, a future?
The complication of its reading is needed for the the AM to function as a monument to
Homo Economicus and his finest aggregate expression, that of the City. Man's becoming
economic is coupled with his replacement of the unsynchronized, affective time of
experience with the metrical, absolute time necessary for the registration of value
and exchange. Time is Money.
3. Model Construction
4. The Ideas
But the taming of time does not come without effect. The absolute space positing the continuity
of a value-added future runs into the problem of (indeed depends upon) material- linear motion
is revealed to be cyclical through both the drive to accumulate (the circuit of converting money
to commodity to money to . . . . ) and the accumulation of the material it has left behind.
The aggrandizing topology of the AM eventually runs over itself, constructing its history as it
does so, like the city that continuously lives and builds over the same places.
