This photography essay was created for the Lyceum Travel Fellowship. Laura Stargala received the fellowship award in 2019. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the research and documentation was focused on a single location. The essay is a documentation of architecture in its material state in and around New York City, also known as Manhatta by the Lenape people. The photographs speak of the distructive history of rapid change that the island’s geological and ecological landmass experienced. It begins with a historical analysis through illustrations, maps and paintings.

 

The island’s rich stratigraphy is characterized by sedimentation and compression, and has also witnessed extraction, construction and demolition. In these territories, limestone, granite, slate, shale, copper, salt, sandstone, clays, and loose soil are the result of an accumulation or deposition of mineral and organic particles.

 

More recently, the arrival of distant lands - building materials coming from the globalized construction industry - has resulted in a transformation of topographies, assemblies of new structures, as well as the displacements of bodies and materials. In this photographical essay, architecture is defined as a composition of matter, moving in and out of states of human intention. Architecture is photographed not only in its finished condition, but also in its raw state as bedrock in quarries or as a pile of rubble after a collapse into disrepair. Although architecture’s immediate condition presents itself as a space to house human life, its trajectory exists within a larger temporal context. Through this lens, the spatial conditions are documented to speak of the interconnectedness of these lands and the people who occupy(ied) it. The ground acts as a storage for narratives and memories - past and present.

 

Stargala visited nearby national parks, quarries, construction sites, researched historical material flows, and documented architecture around New York City to capture the rapid rearrangement of land at the urban scale.