Mon Oncle: A Lesson in Urban Design

This week, I went to see a screening of Jacques Tati’s Mon Oncle (1958) at MoMA. Mon Oncle focuses on the absurdity of the bourgeois' obsession with modern invention, which imprisons them as much as it sets them free. The film's main expression of this condition is the ultra-modern home of Monsieur and Mademoiselle Arpel, Monsieur Hulot's (Tati's cinematic alterego) sister and brother-in-law. The house (Villa Arpel) is strikingly sterile -- outfitted entirely in modernist furniture that no one finds comfortable, cabinets that open and shut with complex mechanical programming and a garden consisting of concrete stepping stones, steel edges and plants so manicured they hardly seem real.

There's a fantastic scene in Mon Oncle, where the Arpels host a garden luncheon. During this scene, Hulot's nephew, stifled by Villa Arpel and bored to tears by the shallow social display, rips down a portion of climbing vines, destroying the sad, manicured symmetry. The party rapidly deteriorates, ending in insult and injury (due in no small part to Hulot's bumbling navigation around the awkward "natural" space) and the nephew running around the garden in a Native American headdress. Later that night, when Hulot sneaks back to the house to finish tearing down the vines, the circular windows of Villa Arpel transform into patrolling eyes (the silhouettes of the Arpels' synchronized heads).

Obviously, I got a kick out of this battle enacted between the attenuated natural world and the anthropomorphized built environment. In reading Eric W. Sanderson’s Mannahatta: A Natural History of New York (as noted in a previous post, this study is also an exhibition at the Museum of the City of New York), I learned that the Lenape, the Native American inhabitants of Mannahatta, created the structural beams of their wigwams by transplanting tree saplings in a circular plan and bending them inward. The contrast of the Lenapes literally building shelter from live nature with Villa Arpel's precise, tamed gardens brings me back to Anne Whiston Spirn, who posited in 1984 that to ensure the continued success in the urban environment, "nature in the city must be cultivated… rather than ignored and subdued." I think Tati would have agreed.

Ruining Nature, Then Beating it at its Own Game

Nature has a way of purifying itself, but then we come along and make of mess of things and throw nature off its game. Then we realize how much we screwed things up and devise ingenious ways of replicating natural systems with technology. It's a bit of a hopeless cycle, but it brings me to the topic of this post: water pollution control plants.

Water pollution control plants use physical and biological processes to closely duplicate how wetlands, rivers, streams and lakes naturally purify water. In the natural environment, this process can take weeks; at water pollution control plants, it takes only seven hours.

At New York City's 14 treatment plants, wastewater (i.e. whatever is flushed down the toilet or washed down the drain) undergoes processing to eliminate roughly 85% to 95% of pollutants before the treated wastewater is disinfected and discharged into local waterways. The "sludge" that is the byproduct of the treatment process is stabilized by converting it into biosolids, which can be utilized as a fertilizer, water, carbon dioxide and methane gas.

I had the unique opportunity to visit the Newtown Creek Water Pollution Plant in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, and it is really the coolest place I've ever been. The design of the plant, established by Polshek Partnership, makes an (admittedly) icky process positively chic. Keep an eye out for the huge metal domes (these beauties are literally full of shit) when driving on the BQE or flying into Laguardia Airport.