In October, the Wildlife Conservation Society and the Economic Development Corporation plan to announce the winner of their competition to re-design the exterior of the New York Aquarium on Coney Island. Three finalists were selected from 25 designs submitted earlier this year after entrants were asked to re-envision the aquarium, making it more "engaging and inviting" and creating a "beacon for Coney Island."
When I told one of the finalists, Catalan architect Enric Ruiz-Geli, that June is the 50th anniversary of the 14-acre Coney Island site, it was the first he had heard about it. Not surprising for an institution that spends little money on marketing or promotion and only attracts 750,000 visitors a year (the Shedd Aquarium in Chicago gets over two million). It was difficult to get any information about the competition from either the WCS, whose spokesperson would only say that the EDC "controls everything" or the EDC, who wouldn't even acknowledge that there were three finalists. It was like talking to the Pentagon about nuclear secrets.
The 39-year-old Ruiz-Geli was more forthcoming. With his Barcelona-based firm Cloud 9, Ruiz-Geli has been on the cusp of architectural super-stardom since his design for a hotel was included in MoMA's 2006 exhibit "On Site: New Architecture in Spain." The model of the hotel so impressed the museum's former Chief Curator of Architecture & Design Terry Riley that it has been included in their permanent collection. Riley calls Ruiz-Gelli's work "performative architecture" and, indeed, he has a strong background in stage design; from 1993 to 1998, he worked at the Water Mill Center with Robert Wilson.
Ruiz-Geli describes himself as "one of Gaudi's kids" and as a "maximalist, not a minimalist." He recently told me, "Architecture must be complex. I want to give more: more commitment, more content, more complexity. We need poetry and drama and architecture that makes a complete statement that is fully charged." When I asked if that wasn't just "archi-tainment" like the faux cities and environments in Las Vegas, he explains that "in architecture as in video games, what matters is the script. Games can have beautiful music and visuals and interactivity, but when the script is about killing, that is the bad part."
He follows South American writer Jaime Lerner and his philosophy of culture as acupuncture: lots of little pin pricks as opposed to one big statement. He sees his proposal for the aquarium as a small part of much larger plan to reactivate a neighborhood. Ruiz-Gelli's proposal would completely cover the entire aquarium with a giant, mesh net covered with lights: similar to his design for the Barcelona hotel. The curves of the supporting structure seem to mimic the Cyclone roller coaster next door and as the New York Times observed: "It resembles an enormous whale, as though Moby Dick had lunged ashore and swallowed the aquarium whole."
Ironically, the New York Aquarium sits on the former site of Dreamland, one of the last of the grand amusement parks that spread along the shore and drew million of visitors before burning to the ground in 1911. Hopefully its redesign will re-ignite that spirit.
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