Police States: Biopolitical and Tactical Urbanisms of the NYPD
Pratt Institute School of Architecture
Summer 2009 Options Studio
Critic: Michael Chen
STUDIO OVERVIEW
Michel Foucault has suggested that the police at least in their original definition, have special status among institutions essential to political logics of societies. The police are concerned with coexistence, or the circumstances of individuals and their relationship to larger entities such as states and populations. They might be thought of as essential to the formation of the modern state as an independent entity apart from the sovereign insofar as the police regulate the circumstances of collectivity that give rise to the state itself and that they are theoretically obligated to stimulate and regulate the mechanisms of society on the broadest level and across a number of scales of relation. They are a political technology and are simultaneously attuned to the behavior of populations in relation to their environment, to individuals within a population, and ultimately to the circumstances and logics that permit the formation of populations and organizations in the first place. Concerned as they are with the management and interrelational logistics of living populations within living environments, their politics are biopolitics and their technologies are techno-ecological.
In a historical sense, the police are agents of protocol, organization and collectivity, which are the prerequisites for urbanism and cosmopolitanism. Of course they are also themselves an organized collective with a centralized command structure, internal protocols, and a wide range of distribution within the city and beyond. Their terrain is primarily the city although their operations span the globe, they enlist a broad range of technological apparatuses of mediation, control, and accumulation, and they produce architectural and urban design through explicit and implicit means by asserting their role as guardians of safety and security.
The aim of the studio shall be to explore the spatial, organizational, technological, and material protocols of the NYPD and to propose a series of tactical architectures that negotiate them and that might be understood to be essential to organizational characteristics of the city generally, as well as in relation to the police. The nature of these protocols range from the highly institutionalized to the highly provisional, from highly ambient and sensory to directly corporeal and material, from systems that are predominantly open and accretive such as data gathering to those that are primarily enclosure and limit-oriented. These are protocols that may be leveraged to locate heightened opportunities for agency and endlessly novel organizations and spatialities for the city. Our primary scales of operation will negotiate the scale of individual bodies, collections of bodies, between bodies and environments, and urban and spatial scales.
The Civic Center of Lower Manhattan as a whole and the regions immediately adjacent to One Police Plaza in particular will be understood to be the operative context for the proposals.
METHODOLOGIES
Primary research will take place within the context of material exploration and physical and digital modeling. Students will be encouraged to document and develop parametric design tools using the Grasshopper plug-in for Rhino and Rhino Script. Projects will be developed through intensive and iterative material research and fabrication.
Students will collectively establish a working research archive from which subsequent individual research will be developed. Each student team will present research material to the studio and the collective research will be archived online for ease of access.
The semester will begin with a series of intensive readings and in-class seminar discussions to establish the critical framework for the studio. Students will be expected to participate in all seminar discussions and to complete all required readings.
Police States Analysis
Working in collaborative groups of two to three, students will compile research related to the practices and protocols of the NYPD. Research will be formatted to a given two-page spread template. Material practices and physical modeling will be an important component of all research.
Research will be understood to be essential to the development of logics and design strategies and will be comprised of six important and interrelated categories of information:
Body States: Armor, Prostheses, and Cybernetic Hybrids
Management States: Watchtowers, Command Centers, Security Perimeters, Demonstration and Crowd Control Protocols
Building States: Precincts, Police Headquarters
Urban Design States: Security Zones, Civic Center
Sensory States: Surveillance, Responsive Systems
Database States: Intelligence Gathering, Behavioral Analysis, Data-mining
Parametric Research
Digital parametric methodologies will be the primary means by which projects in the studio are developed. Compiled research will be used to generate a series of studies pertaining to the character and logics of geometry that underlie the operative states of the NYPD. Selected states will be assessed for both intrinsic parameters, which is to say the internal or consistent conditions that contribute to a state’s characteristics, and extrinsic parameters, or the inputs and feedback each state exhibits in relation to contexts and relational circumstances.
Parametric research will be explored via a series of diagrams and analytical drawing and notation that will be used to construct parametric models using the Grasshopper plug-in for Rhinoceros. A series of brief workshops and technical support sessions will be held throughout the semester, but students will be responsible to develop their own tools and methods.
Material Practices
Simultaneous with the development of digital and drawn analytical and generative research, students will conduct a robust material experiments and practices. Intensive and serial material production will be an essential component of all projects in the studio. Material practices will originate in analysis of NYPD material practices and be refined and developed in tandem with the parametric research. The full range of analog and digital fabrication tools available within the School will be used.
Physical models will be rigorously tested, photographed, and diagrammed. Intrinsic and extrinsic effects and feedback of physical models and their environmental and contextual variables will be explored and intensified via the parametric research.
New Protocols/New Practices
Projects in the studio will be developed at a range of scales from body scales to urban scales. Two primary scales of production will be considered.
Prototype Scales: Students will develop a prototype construction operating primaril at a scale larger than a single human body, but small enough to negotiate the scale of an architectural interior or a public space in New York City.
Urban Scales: Students will consider the terrain surrounding the existing police headquarters building at One Police Plaza in Lower Manhattan and the proposed addition to the original headquarters.
CONTEXT
The New York Police Department is the largest and oldest police force in the United States and features a wide range of specialized departments and equipment and close to 40,000 uniformed officers operating in the US, Canada, Mexico, the UK, France, Gernamy, and Israel.
The Police Department Headquarters is housed at One Police Plaza, completed in 1973 by Gruzen and Partners and part of the larger Civic Center complex of Lower Manhattan. The building houses the administrative bureaus of the NYPD as well as the Major Case Squad, centralized database systems, and the department’s anti-terrorism command center. The building occupies a secure zone adjacent to the State and Federal courts, the Manhattan Federal Detention Center, the Manhattan Municipal Building, City Hall, Pace University, and The Brooklyn Bridge access ramp. A 22,000 addition to the original Police Plaza building has been proposed at the corner of Park Row and Pearl Street to house the department’s crisis command center. In April, 2009 the space within the building traditionally reserved for journalists covering the police department was permanently removed from service as part of the command center renovation.
Since September 11, 2001 the streets surrounding the complex, notably Park Row which had previously served as the primary artery linking the Financial District to Chinatown and the Lower East Side have been closed and are monitored by the NYPD Security Division and the US Marshalls Service. These territories comprise a broad militarized zone intended to protect the building from a terrorist attack and also to project a fortified image of the police headquarters.
