Every year fifty-six million tourists travel to New York City. It is an economy that yields forty-one billion dollars annually, and is integral to the inner-workings of the city’s economy. Yet, the city itself through its organizational structures define who we are and how we reproduce ourselves collectively as a society. We as inhabitants of the city therefore have a right to the city in as much as we have a right to determine who we are by procuring our socio-spatial environment. If we are to consider Marx’s famous dictum - that production and consumption are one in the same - we must then ask ourselves just how is it that the city is consumed today. What are the conditions of life that will be produced in this process? And ultimately, how can destruction - a fundamentally creative act - offer a potential strategy of resistance against the politico-economic forces that are fashioning the city for the twenty-first century? This project aims to address a significant issue that confronts the city of New York today: the commodification of the image of the city. The proposal embraces this condition and reimagines Manhattan as a museum, where New York City itself becomes the content of its own exhibition. The iconic landscape of New York is framed through the expropriation and demolition of 75,414,065 square feet of the city which is refashioned into a series of public squares, social housing projects, and hotel infrastructure. The project therefore is able to reintroduce New York’s own displaced population back into the borough of Manhattan, while its museum program hosts the life of the city as an object for contemplation.
