As someone interested in food access within an urban context, I chose to explore sites frequented by people interested in local agriculture. I visited four sites: Brooklyn Grange (a rooftop farm in LIC), Hell’s Kitchen Rooftop Garden (a rooftop garden on top of a church that donates its produce to the local soup kitchen), the Union Square Greenmarket, and Stone Barns farm. I chose to engage with the Union Square Greenmarket because it was the most accessible and the most populated site that I visited.
I constructed a catenary arch (a curve that supports its own weight by redirecting downward force of gravity into pressure that supports the arch’s curve) from cardboard that I collected from the area surrounding Union Square. I chose cardboard because it’s a relatively strong, lightweight material that is easily recyclable. I am also interested in its prominence in the advent of the age of online shopping. Because I was particularly struck by the architectural elements of the rooftop gardens that I visited, I wanted to install a piece that suggested the possibility of a more environmentally conscious infrastructure, in which buildings are made from sustainable materials and perform alternate functions (such as that of growing food in normally unused spaces). By integrating found greenery into the top of the arch, this piece became an abstraction of sustainable urban ecology to me. I wanted the arch to be in conversation with the architecture surrounding Union Square, the tents that protect the farmers’ goods, and the local food sold at the site. I also wanted it to relate to viewers bodily through its size and instability (it did eventually fall).
