Be Like Water

Be like water, goes the familiar pop maxim. Speaking about her new book Occupation: Boundary: Art, Architecture, and Culture (ORO) at the Center for Architecture, gave a presentation that was less Bruce Lee and more Robert Smithson. She traced water’s role in the development of the modern city, from the industrial pieces of lower Manhattan and San Francisco to the coastal luxury developments that superseded them. Water attracts and repels, offers sites of leisure and submerges fraught histories. Many of the world’s most oppressed people live on waterfronts, pushed to the flood-prone shoreline by racist and classist systems of power. The wealthy secure plots of coastline for themselves, as if excited by the prospect of danger. As Simon’s wide-ranging examples made clear, there is no one way to understand the water: Just as we begin to grasp it, it changes shape again.