FALLOW CITY
Fallow City Project is an intervention in the typical fabric of suburbia, in the
monoculture of private spaces and cultivated dreams.
Taking the current crisis of the suburbs as a chance, and the most extreme
situation of Detroit as its site, the project aims to develop new scenarios
and new typologies of structures for the emerging fallow cityscapes. The
interventions propose more playful and public ways of using or mis-using
the suburban forms.
Similar to intensive monoculture farming, suburbia is an overstretched
production of property, creating a thinness of space, use, ideas. A fallow
season which releases the city from this productivity creates an interruption
where unusual uses and forms can flourish.
The crisis of the suburbs has up till now been invisible, always un-dramatic
and un-seductive as a design problem. Yet this is the most prolific of urban
landscapes, massive in its effect and most in need of ideas.
The Fallow City Project begun as a Design Laboratory at the University of
Virginia—bringing together a team of students from the departments of art,
architecture, landscape architecture, electrical engineering and chemistry.
Ideas and structures were tested and played out through physical models,
stop-motion animations and narratives. The proposals were assembled
together to construct a Collective Model of a near future suburb of Detroit.
Berenika Boberska
Professor Dean Dass
Professor Craig Barton
Professor Cassandra Fraser
Professor Mool Gupta
McIntire Department of Art
School of Architecture
Department of Chemistry
Department of Electrical
and Computer Engineering
The project culminated in the construction of a 1:1 scale Solar Thicket prototype,
one of the typologies developed for the Fallow City.
Solar Thickets are energy producing structures which can overgrow abandoned
houses—as in a fairy-tale scenario—facilitating their transformation of use.
They can also create shared spaces inbetween houses.
An additive structural system and conductive mechanical connections between
the branch elements make it possible to incrementally grow the electrical
collection circuit. Solar cells are screen-printed onto translucent plastic panels,
which also have circuit connections printed with conductive ink. The atmospheric
quality, the pattern of translucent color and shadows are just as important as
the efficiencyof the solar array.
DESIGN TEAM
Berenika Boberska
Eric Schmidt
Daniel Ballard
Sonia Brenner
Jessica Brown
Alexa Bush
Rachel Callahan
Sarah Cancienne
Jack Cochran
Patrick Costello
Beckett Fogg
Jeff Garrett
Lauren Gilchrist
Leila Harris
Jinhui Huang
Vikram Iyengar
Avery Lawrence
Barada K. Nayak, Ph.D.
Emily Nelson
Fatima Olivieri
Renee Pean
Seth Porcello
Shelley Schwartz
Rachel Singel
Kelley Skinner
Sarah Tisdale
Eric Wong
Guoqing Zhang
FALLOW CITY, 2010
COLLECTIVE MODEL
The Collective Model of a near future Detroit shows a series of
proposals for transformations of the typical suburban fabric:
using a much thinner density and repurposing the structures of
foreclosed and abandoned homes to weave in more playful and public
uses. The crisis of the suburb is a chance for new typologies to take
hold: shared structures, connecting and open structures, elevated
bicycle networks, vertical interruptions to the flatness of the suburb,
energy collecting structures which also create public spaces.
House Lantern
Seth Porcello
House Cosey
Jessica Brown
Roof Landscape,
Up-side-down Frame
Sonia Brenner
City Web
Jinhui Huang
Feral House
Rachel Callahan and Sarah Cancienne
Desire Lines
Emily Nelson
Solar Tower, Solar Thicket
Berenika Boberska
SOLAR THICKET,
ASSEMBLY
The thicket structure system was developed using a combination of
physical model and testing of components at full scale.
The canopy structure is assembled through an additive system. It can
progressively “grow” out of the anchoring shed structure, and can
be changed according to the user’s desires. Each strand of the canopy
consists of pre-tensiled curved space-trusses, which when connected,
act like spanning bridges or arches. In all, there are 4 types of
“trusses”, depending on their bow/flex direction. All components use
identical connector plates, cnc cut from 3⁄8” birch ply. The 1.5” wide
wood strips were ripped from 6 poplar logs. When bent into place they
act in compression, opposite the adjustable tension wire.
SOLAR THICKET
2010, Installation at the Ruffin Gallery, McIntire Department of Art,
University of Virginia
The exhibition presents a full-scale installation of a Solar Thicket
structure prototype, one of the typologies of Fallow City.
Photo by William Wylie
Deploying strategies found in fairytales—Solar Thickets can overgrow
abandoned houses facilitating their enchantment and transformation.
They can connect between houses, create canopies within urban
meadows, and span over streets to interweave a new layer of
public space into the existing fallow suburban landscape. Integrated
photovoltaic systems provide light for public spaces as the city
infrastructure retreats.
hello Peter,
I looked up the Limboug paintings—and I think this must be the one you are referring to…
The city becomes a series of urban structures interspaced in an expanse of forest. The fact
that these are towers, high-tech structures as opposed to huts or houses, and therefore
part of a city typology—is most important. One can imagine the connections and elevated
walkways between them—above the forest canopy—like the City Web project of one of
the students. A sketch for an infrastructure. A bicycle path network above the rooftops.
The fallow city could look like this from a distance—
In the early stage—when the suburban fabric has only just been left fallow, the repetitious
fields of houses, gardens and roads, this flatness, like an intensive farming of one type
of architecture definitely needs a (vertical) interruption—of program, of use, of feeling and
space. So the interventions become Solar-Towers, park/mountain/structures, public space
networks above the private rooftops .
(If places of chance encounters are a measure of existence of a city, then the Fallow City is
far more urban than the healthy suburb ever was.)
Later perhaps the Fallow City—becomes more forest-like, especially from the blue of distance,
the trees seem to connect to form a citywide canopy. But it is far from a natural process!
The composting of the suburban fabric is done by the Surveyors and the Engineers! (Perhaps
some do come from the downsized car industry...) Instead of the city's current policy of
demolishing houses and burying them in their own basements—dismantle, make inventories
of materials like a bower bird. The materials are not just re purposed but transformed, its
more alchemical and through technology. I imagine cnc milling of roof timbers, to make
components for new highly engineered structures... Photovoltaic structures like Solar Thickets
overgrowing houses stripped to their frameworks. Or perhaps it is a soft-bio-demolition as
you say—I know that the Farm-Lab in LA keeps spores of mushrooms especially fond of
building materials. These could become blossoming “feral houses” as in the photographs of
James Griffioen.
As you have guessed I am trying to imagine the Fallow City as far less arcadian… The American
Dream, the pastoral suburbs, the mass cultivation of private space are now over—and
This New Detroit is all about shared structures, networks of public spaces and technology
functioning within a re-wilded city. Perhaps it is a prototype of a new city. Taking the idea of
the medieval city-state - it would be an autonomous city, energy and resource wise.
I came to this first invitation a little late, no doubt losing my way in a late
January snowdrift and missed Berenika’s introduction. I missed that she was
working off an ethical premise that new technologies of primarily solar
powered infrastructural systems could generate new industries for a failed city
built on the promises of a myriad of American automobile-related industries.
I came to this medieval collection of scattered huts serving as vessels for
translucent threads and could imagine that since the organic materials of
20th century house construction in Detroit was primarily wood and carbon
based, this settlement would decompose with predictability in the face of
moisture, dampness and severe thermal fluctuations as abandoned dwellings
left to rot. But out of rotten wood comes regenerative soil where seeds take
root, vines begin to climb, and dense forests by succession re-establish the
place of daydreams and night mares. Fallow is not a condition of passivity
and neglect, but a precious time of pause and microscopic transcendence.
Operations move from the hand and head of mankind’s instrumental
inventions to the power within the Arcadian imagination.
Berenika left The City of Angels to project Detroit in a location, if not oasis
slightly southeast of her intended target. She repeated what Thoreau did
almost two centuries before. In order to understand the city in America he
had to move out of Boston and dwell in a reconstructed dwelling by the edge
of a wooded pond. Thoreau, along with Emerson and Hawthorne, Melville
and Whitman were New World Transcendentalists all, who believed in the
power of the Natural condition found within the singularity of the “terrific”
American wilderness. Fallow City is not a place of passive neglect, but whispers
the voices of fecund young minds in collaboration, exercising the pairing of
conceptual recollections and tremendous constructional skills. I came that
first night not knowing the premises, the optimism, pausing nervously without
principles or strategies in the face of quadratic huts scattered over a decimated
grid and wire-frames emerging from Berenika’s little shop of horrors.
I first read this urban proposition, as a Surveyor, looking for the compatibility
of previous systematic thinking that transforms craft from shop to factory, from
village to infrastructural cities, from the scale of walkscapes matching the
beat of one’s heart, to an automobile oriented spatial culture where our feet no
longer need to touch the ground. As I grew weary of appreciating this project
as a reliable surveyor and accountable engineer, my thoughts wandered to
see the strategies emerging from Nomads coming from the myriad of weather
fronts of this border city of both Motown and chrome tailfins. Surveyors are
certified and are most likely citizens who have straightforward names like Ford.
Peter, these are just some of my thoughts inspired by your writing.
Berenika
Nomads often lack passports, and are strangers who speak with accents, look
for Oases, often founded in the neglected traces of Fallow Ground. Sometimes
in the middle of the night, a campfire and draughts of dark red wine spark
another kind of imagination. Flickering flames highlight the fragmentary tales
of Lunatics who dream of Cities inspired by the Moon in turn particularly
powered by the Sun. The imagination of Lunatics is a complement to Nomads
who reveal Oases somewhere between memory and amnesia, often at the
edge of sunstroke. An urban oasis, or the Nomadic City is a place to pause, to
regain strength, to make whole, again and perhaps to extend the possibilities
of a Surveyors penchant for growth. The city of the Lunatic covers the hours
of darkness, where one does not see clearly, where some can close their eyes
to see the world in a new light from within. In a fallow land, the imagination
is possible only when grain and oil are stored away in the vast cisterns and
attics of mighty warehouses of the imagination. The landscapes of production
painted on the walls of the ancient pyramids depict the preconditions for the
fallow city: fish from the sea and fowl from the sky, papyrus reeds to make
paper to make pictograms for future generations of the resurgent power of
the alluvial floods which produce the magic of resurgent seeds, and thus seas
of grass to feed nations of collaborative citizens and strangers.
What have we learned from this stranger who visited us from afar? I have
learned that we can study the contemporary city not by looking at the successful
models of Barcelona, persistently transforming New York, London and Paris, but
at the failed city of Detroit. We curiously did not set up a studio in the evacuated
bowels of Detroit, but shivered in the frozen space of rural Virginia through an
unrelenting frigid winter. In the end, the Fallow City Projects transformed the
Gallery space in Ruffin Hall, about the size of an evacuated Fallow City hut,
now made into a compost pile, no spider’s den, utilizing the ingenuity of a
Irishman’s shanty decoded and reconstructed at the edge of a luminous pond.
This is a set of specifications for construction prepared by optimistic souls of
engineers and gardeners, monks and musicians spinning spatial tales of
origins for a city both familiar and strange, silently creepy, rattling in the wind,
all in concert revealing fingerprints in the act of making. It is rumored that
fierce bison still roam in the deep dark shadows of ancient Polish forests. It can
be imagined that this winter-time project of Berenika Boberska in rural Virginia
embracing the deathbed shrouds of a dying Detroit evoked on the spring
equinox gallery opening a flood of reframed light and iridescent constellation
recalling the golden radiance of the Limboug Brothers’ illuminated medieval
plates of the city regenerated to house the promise of fallow ground.
— 20 July 2010
3
4
Solar Tower, Berenika Boberska
W
hen I was in primary school in New York City I observed that fall time
was the proper season to let the land rest. We had a schoolyard
where we celebrated the bounty of surrogate harvests early in the school
year. But classroom windows demand we bear witness to the world beyond
the blackboard and the textbook, beyond the easel and the pet gerbil.
'Sometimes the world stands still, pauses, and begins again on its own
accord. Land is let to lay fallow in the fall first covered by a brilliantly colored
blanket of leaves, followed if undisturbed by a quicksilver quilt of snow
and sometimes-crystalline ice. Even winter’s fog and early spring mists leave
watermarks of delicate whispered forces upon the lay of the land. In the
dark days of the year, all manner of mankind and beast huddle in motionless
slumber at the edge of fallow fields conserving energy for feral nightmares
and recurrent daydreams.
In 1403 the Duc du Berry commissioned perfect and imperfect strangers,
the Limboug Brothers from Flanders to document the state of twelve
city-states scattered over the medieval feudal French countryside. These
visions followed the format of a book of hours, no days, actually the twelve
months of the agricultural/pastoral life cycle. The frontispiece depicts
Henri, Duc de Berry at a huge banquet table with the cornucopia of his rich
estates: fish from rivers and lakes, lamb and beef from pastoral operations,
fowl, domestic and wild, and of course the bounty of hunters who scoured
the dark woods adjacent to domestic landscapes. This first image is a close
up view of an interior with large windows framing both urban extensions
and the receding scales of the blue of distance revealing three natures: the
wild, the cultivated landscape, and the garden. It is speculated that this great
feast might be held around December 25th when there were sure signs of
slightly lengthening days just after the winter solstice.
The following eleven plates or visions marking the status of each distinct
chateau and adjacent agricultural cycle depicted, under the gilded frame of
the appropriate constellations, the sequential collaboration of peasants and
their domesticated beasts alternating between hibernation and wood
gathering, then onto plowing and pruning, then planting and fishing, onto
harvesting and shearing, onto hunting in an equestrian parade and finally
wild boar baiting deep in the haunted woods which obscure retreating
chateaux. In the eleven depictions of the City as Chateau, the construction
of artifice appears first to be small and if not abandoned, visited on occasion
by an occasional pack animal and ancient wood cutter meandering through
a fallow and snow blanketed landscape. But with the arrival of spring the
portals of the City pry open to reveal a two-way traffic of routine processes
1
and rituals of production. In each frame there are growing populations of not
only the family of man but all manner of domesticated as well as fiercely
feral beasts At the time of harvest the chateau looks huge indeed having
grown in girth and height, with resurgent towers almost obliterating the sky
The eleventh month of November is the last in this medieval saga where
the blackened forest dominates the waning day, and hapless hunters only
bear witness to the feral energies of their mob like baiting dogs challenging
a huge fierce wild boar in mortal combat. We are left with an abandoned city
in the background, no open gate in sight, indeed passage to the city is
denied by the double-crossing labyrinths of the forest stretching into the night.
Indeed this terrifying and laconic last panel is where Berenika Boberska’s
Fallow City Project first emerged to spark my imagination in the midst of the
winter siege of 2009–2010. It snowed for a month in Charlottesville, and
day after day, as I looked out of our large classroom like windows onto the
stilled and certainly frozen fallow landscape, I began become again a humble
witness recalling the fallow and feral pauses of my urban youth. In here,
within a shanty in North Garden, Virginia, I could only observe the stillness,
the silence, the mystery of out there, something rustling, crackling, perhaps
subversive bacteria bloating just out of sight. I shoveled a path over the next
month to leave some trace of my instrumentality, only to be a erased again
and again on my way out of our forest lodge in the fold of the Blue Ridge,
I made it into the University finally to find an invitation to visit a winter-term
collaboration of studio art and architecture students in the bowels of Ruffin
Hall. I came to a discussion of a work in process, to encounter not the fallow
space of silence and retreat, but rather the restorative, no nutritional, no
festering energy inherent in a landscape left to go natural, self-determined in
a city in spatial traces which one might mistake as wild. But the discussion
of a reduced city of dwellings abandoned by citizens without work is a story
of becoming strangers in their own lands, and took on the metaphor of a
fallow terrain now turned feral, of the domesticated not returning to the
wild, but rather the feral. On that still fierce wintry night, a neighborhood of
translucent huts were modeled of Mylar and basswood, all pallid and illuminated by lanterns beneath the collective model base hinting of a new source
of solar and/or geo-thermal infrastructure for that mo-town/soul-full city.
FALLOW CITY/
FERAL OPERATIONS:
ON SURVEYORS, NOMADS,
AND LUNATICS
An artist/architect from Poland by way The City of the Angels found her way
to the foothills of rural Virginia to collaborate with 28 artists and architects to
envision a city so down trodden and forlorn, seeking to spin and then to weave
regenerative threads for a new City made of composted resources generating
mazes and labyrinths rather than platonic geometrically precise orders.
2
by Peter Waldman
Photo by Jeff Garrett
world’s forests have mostly disappeared, reduced to woodlots, the mythic power of a place
outside of intellectual grasp where fantasy and its resultant anxieties freely co-mingle,
remain a force of imagination. Here, logical construct, rational behavior, and rule of law are
displaced by a more primal understanding of human nature. Intuition and other forms of
non-rational thought are the norm. Time, measured as a continuous line that organizes
random events into the logic of history has less visceral immediacy than the temporal
cycles of daily, monthly, and seasonal rhythms that are so directly experienced in the forest.
Orientation in the forest, spatially as well as metaphorically, is a tenuous and fleeting hope,
obscured by the ever-present darkness within and the forest’s boundless expanse. It should
therefore come as no surprise that Dante locates his narrative on Hell within the forest:
“Midway in the journey of our life I found myself in a dark wood, for the straight way was
lost. O how hard it is to tell what it was like, that wild and mighty and unfriendly forest, the
very thought of which renews my fear! So bitter was it that death could be no worse. But, to
reveal what benefit it brought me, I shall tell of the other things I found.” Dante captures
here the complex and contradictory nature of the forest-a place where to get lost within
was more bitter than death, and at the same time having the potential to reveal something
extraordinary about human nature.2
FALLOW CITY
PROJECT
A MYTHIC RETURN
by Robin Dripps
In his evocatively titled essay “Ghosts at the Door” JB Jackson lays out the enduring tension
between city and forest: “The Perpetual challenge of the forest stirred the imagination as
did no other feature in the environment. It was the forest where the outlaw went to hide;
it was there that adventurous men went to make a new farm and a new and freer life. It
teemed with wolves, boars, bears and wild oxen. It contained in its depths the abandoned
clearings and crumbling ruins of an earlier civilization. It was a place of terror to the farmer
and at the same time a place of refuge. He was obliged to enter it for wood and game and in
search of pasture. For hundreds of years the forest determined the spread of population and
represented the largest source of raw materials; it was an outlet for every energy. Its dangers as well as its wealth became part of the daily existence of every man and woman.”3
With its Solar Thickets, Feral Houses, and Roof Landscapes, and even its more abstract City
Webs, the Detroit viewed through the Fallow City Project is a place hovering precariously
between the comfort of urban culture and the equally productive discomfort of the forest.
But unlike Dante’s protagonist, Rousseau’s romantics, or Thoreau himself, the inhabitants
of this imaginary Detroit are not required to leave the city for an authentic forest experience,
it is a constant presence and continuing reminder of what it means to be human.
Detroit is losing its population. Houses, shops, businesses, and civic institutions are derelict
shells. Many have already been dismantled leaving only the slightest hints of the animated
city that used to be here. The emptiness is eerie. It is not just that there is so little there,
but rather that there are so many reminders of what used to be there that produces a more
charged emptiness. While unsettling, it is not without benefit. What do these traces hold
for us in terms of their revealing of ideas of the city obscured by the business of daily existence.
In his collection of folk tales, Marcovaldo: The Seasons of the City, Italo Calvino describes one
such reflective encounter. During the seasonal exodus taking place every August, Marcovaldo
2
finds himself to be the only remaining inhabitant of Milano. In this place now empty of all
animation, “Marcovaldo’s eyes peered around seeking the emergence of a different city, a city
of bark and scales and clots and nerve-systems under the city of paint and tar and glass and
stucco. And there, the building which he passed every day was revealed to him, in its reality,
as a quarry of porous gray sandstone; the fence of a building-site was of pine planks still
fresh, with knots that looked like buds; on the sign of the big fabric shop rested a host of little
moths, asleep…you would have said that, the moment human beings had deserted the city,
it had fallen prey to inhabitants hidden till yesterday, who now gained the upper hand.” This
was not told as a metaphor of decline but instead as a revelation about other inhabitants
who occupy his city and the wonderment that they offer. Marcovaldo’s childlike dreams of a
different city, a city so totally in tune with seasonal rhythms and natural flows that it becomes
the wild, animate, fantastic construct that is nature itself.4
In all of these tales, the nostalgia for a lost nature is strong. The post enlightenment project
to understand the world as a logical construct capable of being unraveled and ultimately
controlled by its human occupants resulted in such a shift towards a reductive scientific
rationalization of things that other means of comprehension were lost. The sensory
apprehension of phenomena, instinct, feeling, intuition, play, and other modes of coming to
terms with the world did not fit this model and were equated with primitive and animalistic
behaviors and thus needing to be kept as far away as possible. The resistance of the cyclical
patterns of birth, growth, decay, and death to the new science only made the desire to bring
these under intellectual control stronger, thus further distancing humanity from its natural
origins. The question remains-is this inevitable? Is the long standing oppositional polarity
between human and nature a failed intellectual construct? Are we only able to be human
by denying our being a part of this vibrant world of other beings? These are indeed,
discomforting thoughts, which is why they are mostly expressed through the less threatening
lens of the fairy tale or perhaps in the seemingly idle but productive daydream.
The Hairy Shed is a hybrid construct. It is part shed, carrying all the cultural charge expected
of it, but it also something animate, something growing, something alive. It is a force of
nature but also a refuge from the wild. It also might be understood as a stop motion animation
of the outcome of the purportedly flawed engineering of the straw hut being blown away by
the wolf as example of the moral lapse associated with the laziness of that first unfortunate
pig. In retrospect, and with the image of the elegant construction of the Hairy Shed to shift
the discourse, we might think of this cautionary tale differently. We might now value the
clever use of a sustainable resource and its employment as a lightweight, flexible, resourcepreserving mode of existence that is open to the flows of nature. It also might suggest that
we rethink how we frame the cultural constructed problematic of the wolf.
The Fallow City is a city in suspension, a place resting, preparatory to future growth. Although
acting as metaphor the suggestive agricultural reference is critical. While the vast swaths
of vacant lots and abandoned homes in Detroit and other American cities are seen by many
as evidence of a blight indicative of the decline in values at the core of the American psyche,
the work in this exhibit shows another, far more optimistic interpretation. The excitement
and hope of this anticipated future gives substance to the preparations as well as the
implications of these fallow fields. What are the clues to be discovered in a close reading of
these sites of future action? There turns out to be quite a few. The agricultural context is
powerful. Is its suggested future presence a critical action aiming to redress the problematic
relationship between agriculture and urban culture?
Within the larger critical vision of the new Detroit that Boberska and her group of students
present here, where natural process in its many manifestations is fully engaged in urban life,
agriculture plays a significant role. This would seem obvious and yet its exclusion from the
city to ever more distant territories and the increasing disconnect between industrial food
production and the culture of farming has not served us well. The urban dweller has little
knowledge about the implications of what is being eaten. Where is the food grown, how is it
grown, what are the social conditions at work, how will production be assured when
agricultural land is being increasingly taken for other forms of development? The culture of
growing, in other words the reason for the hybrid linguistic construct, requires an understanding of the local ecology and what it is best suited for, values the cyclical pattern of
seasons, understands the importance of fresh, and appreciates the distinction made centuries
ago by Brillat-Savarin between feeding and dining, is far from the values of industrialized
agri-business. The history of urban form is explicit about the many villages, towns, and
cities that developed from a farm typology. Within the present context this would be hard
to imagine. And yet this is exactly what Fallow Detroit is waiting for. Taken literally, Detroit is
preparing for the next planting. What is imagined is a vibrant agriculture that is as entwined
with human existence as the images of the Feral House and the Roof Landscape.
Underlying much of the work here is the sense of a new form of urban space. Rather than the
flat, two-dimensional planning that is the norm, this work develops in three-dimensional space
where the public realm is free to expand beyond its politically predetermined monumental
situation on the ground. Paths meander through trees, over roofs, and climb to the top of towers.
The already established political and social order of the ground is contravened by this new
network of connectivity now directed by the desires of individuals who are making their own
decisions about where they want to go and who they wish to encounter. These webs represent
a more ephemeral set of desire lines able to adapt to the rapidly shifting social territories of
a dynamic city. Paths bifurcate, converge, and overlap to create new social territories often for
demographics groups at the margin. This extended public network has the further advantage
of engaging more aspects of ordinary life as part of urban theater. This, of course, is the nightmare of traditional city planning where orderly division and control are the more prized values.
Berenika Bobreska has set out an important challenge. Her city is not the city of its original
City Beautiful planners where beauty was an a priori geometrical imposition on a living,
vital, and sustaining systems of natural interactions. Instead it sees beauty in a more
compelling and more dynamic set of relationships that engage human desire with the
forces of nature that must ultimately sustain this. It is a highly pragmatic proposition that
gains its strength from its playing into the sub conscious world of day dreams where
seemingly impossible but necessary outcomes are the norm.
4
5
Feral House photo by James D. Griffioen
T
1 Giambattista Vico, The New Science of Giambattista Vico, Trans. Thomas Godard Bergin and Max Harold
Fisch, rev. ed. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press,1968), 424.
he vast emptiness confronting visitors to Detroit can be disorienting, destabilizing,
and depressing. The once beautiful plan of radiating streets connecting the political
center to all its citizens has ceased to be the exemplar of democratic ideals, existing now as
mere traces trying to hold their own as the ineluctable process of natural succession takes
over and turns this political dream into the primal wilderness of myth. The process parallels
what Giambattista Vico described in 1744 when writing in his New Science. Civilization, for
Vico, originated in the wild and advanced through a physical and cultural process where
lone individuals create primitive shelter, leave this in order to band together as a political
entity, develop and refine their institutions and form the academies that preserve what they
have learned. Ironically, his explanation is similar to the way a forest develops its matrix
of biologically rich diversity over time, starting with simple single cell organisms that begin
working together to produce the increasingly complex interrelated structure of a diverse,
sustainable eco system. But, unlike the organisms of a self-sustaining forest, Vico sees
human action tending towards a tragic dissolution caused by the conflict between the
innate force of human self-interest and the more abstract ideal of communal good.1
2 Dante Alighieri, “Hell” in the Divine Comedy (1314), Trans. Louis Biancolli (Reprint, New York: Washington
Square Press, 1968), 3.
3 J.B. Jackson, “Ghosts at the Door,” in Ervin H. Zube and Margaret J. Zube, eds. Changing Rural Landscapes,
(Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1977).
4 Italo Calvino, “Summer, The City all to its Self,” Marcovaldo: Or the Seasons in the City, Trans. William Weaver,
(New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1983).
Vico’s narrative about the rise and fall of civilization from its origins within a forest clearing
to its eventual decline, decay, and loss to reforestation could be a description of Detroit.
Houses are so few and so sparsely inhabited that one feels a strange sense of the uncanny.
The sense of unreality is palpable. Questions are disturbing. Is this a harbinger of decay
slowly spreading to other cities across the country and challenging the validity of the whole
urban and economic enterprise? Or, as Berenika Boberska’s Fallow City Project suggests,
might this be a field of opportunity waiting for the preparations requisite for its transformative
reinvention into something more optimistic?
The first view of the Hairy Shed, with its exuberant, antler-like emanations held taut by
a web of wire gives a sense of what is going in here. It fills a room that barely seems able to
contain its prickly tendrils, creating a substantial obstacle to normative gallery-opening
social etiquette. Have we entered the primal forest with its mythic dissonances of renewal
and terror? This is the stuff of fairy tale, and its more rationalized progeny, the folk tale
where through allegory we learn lessons, often unsettling, about who we are and the
unexpected outcomes of what we aspire to.
Persistent throughout the multiple narratives and provocative images of the Fallow City
Project is the presence of the forest. Within literature, especially folk literature and fairy tale,
the forest has operated as analogue to the tensions existing within human thought itself.
A place of refuge and resource and a place of danger are characterizations that have coexisted
for ages. Although originating when forests were vast and villages and towns small, forest
lore has maintained its hold on human imagination, often in manifestations removed from
the forest. The forest is one of the most reliable resources for humans to literally build on
or with. Its resources have been quantified, categorized, and organized for production and
support of urban culture over a substantial span of history. As science has increasingly
explained the processes of growth, change, and decay as an efficient, self-sustaining ecology,
its role in our imagination would seem to be as an exemplar of rationality. But even as the
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Image by Berenika Boberska,
from book project Time,
University of Virginia
POSTCARDS FROM THE NEAR FUTURE | FALLOW CITY 2010