An Anarchitectural Body of Work: Suzanne Harris and the Downtown New York Artists’ Community in the 1970s by Friederike Schäfer. De Gruyter, 400 pp. $76.
Picture it: It’s the summer of 1976, and you’re walking into a mound of sand on the southwestern edge of Manhattan Island. The World Trade Center, completed just three years earlier and currently the tallest structure in the world, looms above; the sand is actually the top layer of a ninety-three-acre landfill containing refuse from the construction of the Twin Towers and other urban development projects. What was supposed to already be where you stand now—the mixed use chimera of Battery Park City—won’t be complete until the end of the century. Instead, you are confronted with Suzanne Harris’s site-specific architectural earthwork LOCUS/UP↓〉ONE, which will be gone by summer’s end. Entering the void and moving through a short tunnel, you perambulate around the four roughly eleven-foot sides of a stucco-covered plywood cube inscribed within a circular crater twenty-one feet in diameter. Inst…