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ARCHITECT AND URBANIST FREDERICO CANUTO ADDRESS: RUA PERNAMBUCO, 739/101 BAIRRO FUNCIONARIOS CEP: 30130-151 BELO HORIZONTE MG BRAZIL

GRID: ESSAY SUBMISSION

MANHATTANISM VIRUS

In 2012, the multiple blocks that together compose the island of Manhattan began to shatter. Each block, and sometimes groups of blocks, and its adjoining streets, detached from each other and began a process of migration that will go on for years, and, according to scientists, should cause the inevitable fragmentation of the Manhattan Island and its disappearance from the map. At the same time, some urbanists, researchers and other professionals, each one in their specific area of interest, have already stated in congresses and seminars around the world that such disaggregation will transform the world in part of the GRID invented in Manhattan.

Despite some points of disagreement, all believe that the orthogonal net GRID that defines the Manhattan Island in terms of space and that is limited by the territorial size of the island, will increase when it shatters itself, launching pieces adrift. I.e., new environmental, social, economical, political, at last, urbanistic situations will be invented as the island increases in size, making its GRID almost infinite everything will be streets and buildings, even little islands and the sea.

However, that is not the first time the island has been under danger of deformation, by subtractions or additions in its land. Maybe that is why the population is not alarmed, receiving the news as part of the islands destiny in its constant (des) aggregation movement.

Considering the citys history and the way its orthogonal net has been implanted over the island territory, this process becomes even more familiar. The embankments

3 made in the south part of Manhattan, for instance, increased the island potential for new building areas and created more and new space to receive ships. The disappearance of the original mountainous topography due to the transportation of large amounts of earth, introduced the GRIDs logic of equality, i.e., the equivalence of the Manhattan forming parts in regular rectangular blocks with the same amount of area, both horizontally as vertically.

Likewise, the fact that the island connects itself to different systems garbage collection, water, energy, telecommunications, roads in order to survive as an dependent organism makes its territory much larger than the island, by expanding its domination beyond the faded urban system and into other places other than New York. That connection, today understood as part of a metropolization (or even a megapolization) phenomenon, has its conceptual roots in the orthogonal net, created in the beginning of XIX century in American lands.

It is also important to remember that in continental terms the shattering of a land is not something new. The phenomenon of Pangaea tells us the same story, given that the continents arrived to their actual form through the dismemberment of a previous unit. What was, millions and millions of years ago, one single solid rock involved by one single ocean and crossed by canals, was fragmented and produced todays continental geography, as reproduced by satellite images. As countless images reproduced by National Geographic and The History Channel show, such continental movements havent stopped (today there are still small movements that approach or

4 separate the six continents every few years). It is possible to say that we are in gigantic drifting islands.

CLOUDS

Since the beginning of the fragments movement out the old Manhattans limits, they were adrift and began transmit Manhattan spatial modules around the world. The

phenomenon was called Manhattan Contagion or MV Manhattanism Virus as those modules founded new territories or got attached to preexisting ones, bringing to other nations a different spatial and architectural logic. In some extent, it could be said that new nationalities will arise from these encounters. Or even, no-nationalities.

In the Lower East Side, where the first detachments happened, the big areas taken by housing blocks were broken into pieces that were transformed in small vertical boats.

5 In those tower-like-boats, functions were shared by the population: garbage collecting, sailing, cooking, teaching, among others. As small functioning modernist units comprising the four basic functions sleeping, recreation, walking and working they moved for days across the ocean.

Part of the population, disoriented by the lack of contact with the virtual and social world, in a city that used to be the Center of the world, usually left their computers connected in solar cells provided by the City Hall. Once the moving process began, the government launched a series of policies in order to turn each unity self-

sufficient in energy and food terms: solar cells were distributed and inhabitants were taught how to plant gardens in different conditions.

The solar cells, besides providing for individual energy needs, kept buildings working and were important for the group survival, specially in terms of food. Architects and designers, as well as engineers, worked for endless weeks before the drifting over the seas began, when the buildings were still connected to New York, in order to transform each building or each group of buildings in unities able collect and keep energy.

At last, in an ordinary day, computers identified a wireless internet connection transmitting a weak sign. Realizing that the sign was intermittent (coming and going), they turned their eyes over the sea and noticed ships in the horizon. With their binoculars, they identify the logo of some of the biggest digital technology companies, coming to the conclusion that those were the clouds.

Between fear and excitement, they explained to their colleagues that all information kept in e-mails and produced in web searching are usually saved in a space called the cloud. Although the name seams to indicate that such information would be in the skies, as waves moving from one place to another, the true is that this cloud exists physically as a database kept in ships that are permanently circulating the world, as to keep their clients information in constant movement. Excited by the potentially unlimited access to the virtual space, that would reconnect them to the world from its major virtual center, they felt as great scientists who had just discovered the origin of life.

Knowing that, such buildings approached and trough a cooperation agreement with the companies came alongside the ships. With a full access to the internet and unrestricted access to the cloud database, those buildings were never seen again. Still, in a quick search over the net, using the words: Manhattan and (name of one of the companies) as key words, as well as the name of those buildings and its inhabitants, they are easily founded. But not as new cities images, but as new virtual territories of a new Manhattan where the GRID is still expanding, like a new form of net.

Today, when such story is mentioned in chats and foruns, it is told a fable as a mythology that includes the narratives of Noahs Ark, the Tower of Babel as Giga and mega bits.

7 ISLANDS

With the shattering of each one of the parts that kept an alive and diverse social cohesion since the 60s through an urban design, other types of cohesion started to be built.

Understanding that such shattering could generate a huge amount of urban area with good unused infra structure, given that many Manhattan inhabitants preferred to sell or abandon their homes rather than live adrift through the oceans, several real state companies decided to buy these buildings at low prices. At the same time, in a tense negotiation with the City Hall and federal organisms, streets, blocks and public gardens were bought too.

Today, researching the Google Earth is possible to see buildings and streets trough the Atlantic Ocean. Attached to the coast as oil platforms, they are known as small resorts and private vertical islands with gardens, as well as garages for cars and boats.

MOVING PARK

10 After countless coastal blocks detached themselves from the island and started moving towards the Atlantic Ocean, the Central Park had room to detach itself from the Manhattan Island. That gigantic park, symbol of a public life and green lung of a highly vertically city, started moving away from the GRID.

For its size, the park until now has not been able to come alongside any other shore, or city. Still, strange phenomena started to happen through its path.

Taken by the Atlantic tides and constantly changing directions due to other oceans streams, the Central Park is now called Moving Park by the people that decided to remain in its grounds, inhabiting it. As it traveled trough shores or went up the streams of the big American and African rivers, the park became a space that can be temporarily used by the inlanders. As it happens in transatlantic ships, parties are thrown at the Moving Park, that has its own swimming poll, sports and resting areas, besides cultural structures, such as museums and biological centers. Ironically, for example, the Metropolitan Museum of Art that detatched from Manhattan e became part of the Moving Park is now a metaphor of a metropolitan way of life that could be exist anywhere.

The Panama Canal, known as a line of more than 80 kilometers of extension that cuts the country and connects two oceans, was one of the places the park stood longest, due to the channel narrowness and due to the differences between the oceans. When passing by, new inhabitants (and along them, new parties) joined the previous ones. As in a territorial symbiosis, small pieces of the park, that had collided

11 with the channels shore, were left behind and once they had adhered to the new surface, became small Central Parks in Panamanian lands.

WALL STREET

Despite the dislocation e proliferation of the shattered GRID all over the world trough oceanic waters, some blocks remained in its original place. Using contemporary techniques of mooring, the Wall Street buildings as well as the buildings from other rich parts of the city remained where it used to be the old Manhattan.

Although that could be interpreted as a conservative position, there is a real reason for those places remaining where they are: they see the Manhattanism Virus as a way to isolate the worlds economical power from any social disturbance as street

12 manifestations. They see it as Brasilia, the capital of Brazil: a power center isolated in the desert, away from populated cities.

That investment of billions of dollars was not in vain.

As Wall Street became isolated by the sea from the rest of the city, a new GRID could go on. A GRID that will affect the citys urbanism as it existed before, but in dimensions that the government can not control. The area of Wall Street started to grow towards the sky, as well as towards the sea depths. The nearby residential buildings were bought by great investors and turned into places where money is made. They became residential habitations of high luxury, flats, conventional centers or other types of buildings that transformed Wall Island into a self-sustained center that produces income and explores distance as its main asset. The access to this new island can only be made through boats or helicopters. Public access has been completely forbidden. Wall Island became a fortified castle.