Ah-Yeon
Kim
Before Boston expanded its boundary by landfill,
water was a dynamic system embracing the whole city. I called this
stage "city in water". Today, water lost its way of presence as a
flow, and exists as element. I named it "water in the city". Natural
sequences of water flow from springs to streams, streams to rivers,
rivers to estuaries and to the sea, became disconnected, dammed and
covered. The rich edges of water became cleared and straightened.
Today, water is rather connected trough the web of underground pipe
lines and this connection is invisible. Many people seem to forget
the fact that water we drink and the water we drain are interconnected
as a whole.
The dialectic relationship between land and water that one is indispensable
to define the other seems to be forgotten. My design proposal for
the Back Bay Fens focused on the recovery of awareness of water flow
in the city. I wanted to reconstruct the memory of the relationship
between water and city in the Fens where the memory of tidal estuary
and the memory of a park as civic infrastructure are inscribed. I
also wanted to represent and revive the fluctuating relationship between
land and water in contemporary hydraulic vocabulary. The message I
tried to implicit in my design is to celebrate and commemorate "the
city in water" with contemporary vocabulary of "water in the city".
|
|
|
