Occupy Atlanta (Woodruff Park) / Midtown Music (Piedmont Park) / The Beltline
As the Occupy movement hibernates for the winter, I wish to reflect on their contribution to the debate over the role of urban green space in society. //
options iii / design studio v
tristan al-haddad
beltline installation / dekalb ave / airline dr
an installation mediating a temporal terminus of a continuous loop. anamporphic projections converge with the voronoi pattern to create a lingering framing of both sky and proximate site.
To find Mint Gallery is to experience Atlanta. It is not the castle on the hill of the High Museum, a collective effort of Richard Meier and Renzo Piano. A promontory of white steel projecting into the sky. An inviting courtyard without an inviting passage. It removes itself from the street and all that the street represents; a coexistence with the pedestrian, the flâneur of the city. The museum does not recognize their existences. They are foreign ideas to the automotive driven city of Atlanta, but the vestiges of such still permeate the urban fabric. //
A proposal for “Art on the Atlanta Beltline.” Patrick Di Rito, Ky Le, James Murray, Shota Vashakmadze. //
It was a foundation: a makeshift substructure for delinquent ambitions, an ideal site for the unsanctioned architecture of skate punks, hood rats, graffiti artists, and other renegade masters of habitus. But they were too close for comfort. Too loud. Their park was found and destroyed, victim to the ruthless side of Beltline redevelopment. //
What does it mean when an entire city is able to forget something, especially when this something never went anywhere? Metropolitan areas are known for their efficient overcrowding use of space, cramming everyone into the center. So how could two permanent scars of the Highline and the Beltline, be abandoned by their respected cities, left to slowly de-evolve from once urban maturity and focus of trains as transportation to the wild natural state of detritus? What happens when they are once again remembered? How do they evolve the wildly natural back into an urban awareness?
With the current evolutionary status of these two sister projects, an intriguing diptych emerges, as the Highline has become more than completely remembered while the Beltline lies in the mysterious in-between of disuse and use. How will the Beltline be remembered?
