Petrified River is a site-specific installation for the garden of the Cooper Hewitt-Smithsonian Design Museum in New York during the 2019 Design Triennial exhibition ‘Nature,’ organized with Cube Design Museum in Kerkrade, the Netherlands. The proposal is part of a research project that explores hybrid typologies that fuse landscapes with the attributes of infrastructures to produce infrastructures that become extensions of the landscape or artificial landscapes that function as infrastructures.

The research explored the transformation process of Manhattan from wild nature to urbanized flattened land, which involved enormous efforts and a massive exploitation of the land (digging, leveling, exploding, reclaiming, filling) with the consequential disappearance of some of its original geographical features.

The proposal – a hill, a river, and a pond made of concrete – serves as petrified metaphor of the rich landscape that Manhattan once was, when it was still known as the “island of many hills.” It is meant to embody the intriguing collision between the infrastructural, the industrial, the artistic, the geological… the difficult balance between the artificial and the natural...[+]