Los andamios de Nueva York: un caso extremo de materialización de las ideas

Like Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour did with Las Vegas, John Willson uses the existing and its singularity as a common thread. He embraces reality rather than denying it and uses the unpredictable as a working methodology. He does this by questioning a specific theme in each episode. In the second episode of the first season (2020) of his documentary series How to..., entitled “How to erect scaffolding”, he wonders about the amount of scaffolding in New York City and why this is so. He explains that in 1979 there was an accident in which a person died as a result of a collapsed facade. In response to this misfortune, City Ordinance 10 was passed in 1980, and in 1998, Local Law 11 was enacted, which affects approximately 16,000 buildings throughout the city. In theory, a building with scaffolding is actively being inspected or repaired. In practice, in New York, 285 scaffolds have been “active” for more than 5 years. How has this situation come about? What are the effects of this materialisation? This article proposes to provide answers to these questions.