Last summer, when you happened to be on the banks of the Delaware River near the Funky, Fishtown district of Philadelphia, which was loaded by Loft, you may have seen a strange event: the end of a pier that did not seem more important than the construction blocks of a child and succumbed to the water for years. Known as graffiti pier, the Structural to the 1970s was used for loading coal on passing ships-a semi-filitated screen for street artists. (Philadelphia is considered the birthplace of graffiti.) Then Instagram came, and how many lively backdrops turned to pedestrians with selfie sticks instead of spray cans.
The sudden collapse of the pier emphasized the contradictory obligations of urban landscapes that have survived their initial intentions – especially those in which history, art and subculture come together. Do you forbid access to a website like this that increase its transgressive attraction or turn it into something friendly and accessible? Already in 2019, which was prepared for the (still pending) purchase of the pier, the non -profit company Delaware River Waterfront Corporation (DRWC) was involved in the New York landscape and urban design company Studio Zewde in order to present a future for them as a public space that may bring some of these competing impulse into line.
“They said: 'Whatever you do, don't make it a high line',” says the founder of the company, Sara Zewde, to me when I visit her Harlem Studio, a bright and sunny former beauty salon, in which the window faces the wide round of the Malcolm X Boulevard. She does not speak of her customers at DRWC, but of the Street artists, whose opinion she has sought brilliantly in the past six years to help her navigate through the paradoxical premise of the project. “Graffiti is about breaking the rules,” she says, “how do you make it a place of the rules?”
Zewde, dressed elegantly in a simple, pleated black top from Nin Studio and pants from the sustainable brand another morning, pulls a foam model of the pier, which was marked with miniature tags, but also scribbled notes from street artists with which she spoke. “How do you keep the original art?” Reads one in blue all caps. Another: “More walls. Larger walls.” It was not easy to communicate with these underground stakeholders, she emphasizes; There were e -mails, telephone calls, a Philadelphia diving strip in which the studio had an open tab to promote unhindered discussions.
But that's the deep investment that Zewde brings into her practice. At the age of 39, she is one of only a handful of black, female landscape architects in America. The New York Times in 2023 reported that this demographic population only made 0.3 percent of the profession. (For architects, black women make less than 0.5 percent.) This is uniquely sensitive to the way landscape and design were used to describe power – but she also made it expansive in her vision.
In autumn, Zewde Simon & Schuster delivers a manuscript about Frederick Law Olmsted. The book that puts in the foreground in 2027 New York Times In Antebellum South (partly) reports on the physical structure of plantations. In Olmsted's Chronicles, his story immediately followed, the work in New York in New York, the creation of the most famous folk park in the world, a place where everyone who occurs is theoretically on the same basis.
At DIA Beacon, the upstate New York Campus of the Dia Art Foundation, another example of your approach this autumn is opened. Since 2003, when the contemporary organization converted a Nabisco box printing factory into a museum, the back, southern side of the room has looked over hectare inconspicuous lawn that was colored by industrial residues. “It was an incredible, huge expanse,” says Jessica Morgan, Dia director. “But it needed work. It was unattractive and in many ways also inaccessible.”