The Accumulation Monument
Proposal for Central Park
Time in a City Competition Entry, 2005
Two concepts are used to transmute the notion of Time and City into the AM. (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 wanting of making it vanish
(profit depends on reducing the signal between supply and demand).
Imbed 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.
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.
| Diagram of Expansion in Spherical Space | |
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| Diagrammatic depiction of points expanding in spherical 3-D space (i.e. space where the x,y and z axes are locally straight yet globally curved, eventually running into themselves; the 3-D analog to a circle). | |
| The Cobweb Model of Cyclical Supply and Demand | |
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| converging toward point of equilibrium- elastic supply curve, more responsive to changes in price | diverging from point of equilibrium- inelastic supply curve, less responsive to changes in price |
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View from path in Central Park |
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View of model |