IMAGINING THE IDEAL CITY (PART II)

Wouldn't it be great if New York City was home to a lot of imaginative temporary structures? I'm talking about festive buildings that are meant to stand up for only two or three years, before being taken down and...and what? Discarded? Packed up and sent somewhere else? It would transform parts of the city into a permanent fairground, without dispacing the structures that are already there.

I love the idea of disposable or collapsible structures like circus tents. Their impermanence is their charm.  For small industrial exhibits and temporary shops, they're just the thing. Of course, even temporary structures can be expensive to put up.

This brings me to the subject of scaffolds, which is the real focus of this post.  Believe it or not, I'm a fan of the stupid things. I just like the way they look. They're often a lot more fun to watch than the buildings they're attached to, and I like to see skilled workers performing for the public. Add to that, that they're fast and easy to put up. What's not to like?

It seems to me that a few improvements in scaffolding technology could make possible cheap, temporary buildings on a large scale.

Here's (above) an easy-to-make temporary office building. You drive a few pylons into the ground to give it a secure base and a bit of a spine, put up the scaffolding real fast, then use a crane to slide in room modules. Sanitation and power lines through flexible rubber hoses.  Elevators would be nicer versions of the no frills kind that scaffolds use now...after all, they are intended for temporary use...two years, maybe three.

Areas that are temporary structure friendly might even have permanent pylons or holes for pylons.

Of course scaffolding comes in all sorts of shapes and styles. How do you like this (above) compact, portable park?

I wouldn't be surprised if foam scaffolding began to appear soon. Nothing to bolt together...you just spray it onto chicken wire forms and it dries rock hard. Such foam could have a lateral sheer vulnerability that would allow it to be demolished quickly by a teenager with a baseball bat. If the pieces fall on you, you might not even be hurt.

A nice feature of foam is that it's easily and cheaply moldable, something like styrofoam is now.  Foam scaffolding could resemble Mayan Temples, or any design we have molds for.

Beautiful structures like this could be so cheap to make that it wouldn't be worth the money to disassemble them and ship them to another city. Just send the molds.

How about a little foam mountain for kids to climb on for a couple of years?  Put them on some of those  empty lots that dot the city.

How about filling in the odd alleyway with a fake woodland path? The grass could be real. Grass grows fast.

Is any of this practical? I don't know, I'm just free associating. New York City already possesses a lot of charm. Those heavy, Empire-style buildings make the town unique and I dread the thought that future planners might be tempted to bulldoze them and substitute a shanty town of temporaries.  Even so, it's a town that provokes speculation. It's fun to think about stuff like this and...who knows?...one idea in a hundred might turn out to be workable.