IN-PERSON: Livable Cities – New York

Abstract

This article investigates an ontological history of ecology in art and architecture since the post-war period in the context of the United States through the lens of a selection of urban and land works by the American modernist artist Tony Smith (1912–1980). Smith was an architect, sculptor and educator whose wide-ranging practice in art and architecture transcended a number of major modernist moments from the New Bauhaus, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin, to Abstract Expressionism and Minimalism. His sculptures—difficult to classify—could be summarily considered to be small scale interventions in dehumanized modern cities as an act of care for disoriented public. They were also politically deployed as possible remedies by city administrators such as John Lindsay, the mayor of New York City from 1966 to1973, during the time of the civil rights movement. The collective outdoor exhibition Sculpture in Environment (1967), for example, organized by Doris Freedman for the New York Parks Department initiated a long legacy of public art supported by percent laws. Reviewing such a trajectory matters in contemporary art and architecture ecology discourse as it guides us to where to stand and move forward beyond the equivocations around ecological livable cities.