Fabricated Archeology: Inhabiting Histories of the Brooklyn Queens Expressway

Justin Ryshkewitch

The goal of this project is to re-establish lost histories of the city. Histories from before the Brooklyn Queens Expressway erased and redrew vast swaths of urban territory. This project speculates on a point of view between the perspective of the person on the street and the top-down view of the planner; a point of view that attempts to bridge the disconnect between these two often competing ways of perceiving the city. In response to the displacement and destruction that resulted from the large-scale transportation projects of the first half of the 20th century, this project reimagines lost building fabric as a new cultural amenity – both a repository of archival history and a visceral reminder of the collateral damage associated with car-centric planning. The intervention returns lost architecture but alters it through the oblique view of the planner, producing a series of distortions, collisions, and encounters that both coopt the existing expressway and raise awareness of its invisible history. The forensic, historical analysis and recreation of perspectival imagery along the historical Navy street where today's Brooklyn Queen's Expressway stands led to a recreation of geometries inspired by Peter Eisenman's Cities of Artificial Excavation. The forensic overlaps and relationship's found between today's existing condition's at the BQE and the historical site of the 1920s along with the overlapping forensically created perspective from the 1920's projected over the top down Point of View that a planner, such as Robert Moses, would have used, create the geometries and spaces for intervention of this project.

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Induced Demand: The concept that adding supply creates more demand. In highways adding more lanes adds more traffic in the long run.

Point of View: The position from which something or someone is observed.

Fabricated Archeology*: A re-creation of human history which includes a re-building of artifacts.

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