Frank Repas, Architect: Week 2, Session 4 — June 18, 2009
Photo by Antoine Duhamel.
This project by Frank Repas is like the Grand Canyon. When you go from Manhattan to the Grand Canyon, you drive for days, arrive in the endless flats of the desert, ditch your car in the vast hot parking lot, wend your way through herds of ice cream eating tourists, of which you are suddenly one, follow the arrows and signs, walk a while, and then boom! There we are. At last.Here we are — at the Grand Canyon. Standing tippy toe up the closest edge to look and see and wonder in awe. Hugh and stunning, vast and beautiful, long and deep that one freezes in the moment of arrival at the edge — the edge between ground and sky and a canyon. The place is precipitous.
Coming from Manhattan and arriving at the Grand Canyon, I could not help seeing the the Colorado River’s cut-out canyon as the reversal of Manhattan.
Grand Canyon
And after seeing the Grand Canyon, returning to Manhattan, I have ever since seen and felt Manhattan as the opposite, the reversal of the Grand Canyon. It is a giant subtractive volume of rock pulled, yanked out and turned around, perhaps right side up from the stone underground canyon in Arizona.
Manhattan Canyon
I see the Shanghai Passenger Ship Terminal as some globally gargantuan earth-work thing, it is a kilometer long, 1/2 mile long and 633,000 square feet underground. It is a deep hole, cut and built between the edge of the river and the edge of the city – a great squeeze. I see it as a long canyon. It is an underground space with a people’s park — a green grass and tree carpet along the top. This neutralized green carpet park, a positivistic ground zero, is lifted up in the middle by a gentle serpentine bridge, a kind of organic wave, while punctuated in the west by a steel and glass, asymmetrical egg held on steel legs.
The escalator below the glass egg leads to the underground terminal. Photo by Antoine Duhamel.
The Passenger Terminal project is not just a building, it is not a mere landscape, it is not a linear city, but it is all of these, in a unique kind of urban design intertwining all. The long canyon below acts as the main passenger terminal for people, cars, buses, and ships arriving and leaving. It is a giant urban tub sunken below water level – its own ship hull. It then holds the columns and walls that hold up the park and the glass egg. The tub as hull is a subtractive dug out space. The space is a void solid, because it is seen and made as something full, not just a space, but a space carrying and conveying pressure. It is pressure in a space that makes it a volume. All surfaces are under pressure here. Like the Grand Canyon, this long cut is topographically important in weight and time and history.
Aerial view.
Below pedestrian bridge during constuction.
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No geologist is surprised that the Colorado River threatened Glen Canyon Dam — the river has removed every grain of rock that once occupied each of its many canyons, including Glen and Grand. The Grand Canyon is roughly three hundred miles long, fifteen miles wide, and one mile deep. This means that the river and its tributaries have excavated an average of 125 million tons of solid rock from the Grand Canyon — each year for the last five million years or so. Not only that, the Colorado has removed even larger dams than Glen Canyon and Hoover. In the last half a million years, the river has blasted to smithereens a whole series of hard lava dams in the Toroweap section of the Grand Canyon, strewing their remnants downstream for eighty miles.
James Lawrence Powel, Dead Pool Lake Powell, Global Warming, and the Future of Water in the West
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Whatever advantage the future has in size, the past compensates for in weight, and at their end the two are indeed no longer distinguishable, earliest youth later becomes distinct, as the future is, and the end of the future is really already experienced in all our sighs, and thus becomes the past. So this circle along whose rim we move almost closes.
Franz Kafka, Kafka Diaries, 1910 – 1913
