For Sex and the So-Called City, Andrés Jaque / Office for Political Innovation in collaboration with Miguel de Guzmán / Imagen Subliminal, make use of lifestyle forensics to unveil and present the underlying themes of Sex and the City, unblackboxing New York City’s obvious (and therefore invisible) blueprints. These investigations collectively offer a groundbreaking – and sometimes shocking – understanding of the outcomes and impacts of contemporary urban life.
What are the social, environmental, and political consequences of our urban lifestyles?
This year, Sex and the City, New York City’s most influential archisocial manifesto, turns twenty. The series, an often prescient telling of the cultural trends that have played out in the two decades since its release, follows the glitz and un-glamour of its four main characters through a tumultuous period of transformation for our beloved city: the late 1990s and early 2000s.
SEX AND THE SO-CALLED CITY is an alternative version of SATC made by Andrés Jaque / Office for Political Innovation with Miguel de Guzmán (Imagen Subliminal) on the occasion of the show’s 20th anniversary!
Storefront for Art and Architecture is getting ready to celebrate and discuss the 20th anniversary of New York’s most influential archisocial manifesto: Sex and the City. This non-stop, ten-week summit stages the most relevant people, places, and processes that played a role in New York’s cultural shift of the last two decades.
How has the contemporary image of the city created new forms of design thinking and practice?
Transformed into a transmedia studio, Storefront’s gallery space will become the setting where a documentary reenactment of the TV series will be filmed and broadcast online, as a way to unblackbox New York’s obvious—and therefore invisible—blueprints.
Since the release of SATC’s first episode in 1998, New York’s real estate market has doubled. As Carrie, Charlotte, Miranda and Samantha made their way from Patricia Fields’ thrift-store-heterogeneous-outfits to multi-brand-high-end-opulence, and from one-bedroom rentals to The-World-of-Interiors-like-apartments, New York engaged in an equivalent evolution.
The city progressed by evacuating its clumsiness, depurating its air and waters and reclaiming its dumping fields. SATC anticipated what would later become a post-2008, sanitized, assets-oriented urbanism, a highendcracy by which new forms of trading air-rights within blocks, LLC-shelled identities and the reinforcement of the 421-a tax exception rendered the city an ecosystem to produce, reproduce and accommodate value.
As fictional Charlotte and Miranda struggled to engineer reproduction, and real-life Sarah Jessica Parker’s daughters were born through surrogacy, Columbus Circle was being transformed as the world center for the reinvention of human reproduction. Elective cytoplasm selection, spindle nuclear transfer, cell banks and surrogacy have been combined in the last decades though archiurban calibrations to make New York the location for a new human type, the citizens of highendcracy.
As shown in SATC’s second episode, New York City brought together for the first time Samantha’s two biggest passions: namely, sex and real estate.
Twenty years later, real estate rendered New York fully sexualized. Chelsea became the planet’s most wanted location to switch on Grindr.
And as new San Fernando Valleys, rent-spiking Greenpoint and Chelsea are now home to two of the hottest adult studios, Burning Angel and Cocky Boys, where refined productions scape garage-like interiors to shoot their Pornhub scenes, which get millions of views, in sunny lofty condominiums with views of purified blue skies. This kind of blueish sky was invented as a rendered reality for New York’s most successful architectural icon, 432 Park Avenue, and then taken as a detail of its architecture by using a fixed Austrian Eckelt Lite-Wall glass for its windows, designed to intensify the blue part of daylight’s spectrum. This material adjustment synchronizes the architectural detail with the city’s territorial project of displacing the environmental cost of its consumptions to rural locations in neighboring states.
Images ImagenSubliminal (Miguel de Guzmán + Rocío Romero)
SEX AND THE SO-CALLED CITY
Andrés Jaque / Office for Political Innovation with Miguel de Guzmán (Imagen Subliminal)
Exhibition February 1st – April 3rd
Shooting Events ‘Marathon of Scales: from Citizens of Highendcrazy to Sexualized Condos’. Tuesday, February 27th (4-9pm); ‘Marathon of Sections: from Blue Skies to the Underground’, March 28th (4-9pm)
Location Storefront for Art & Architecture, 97 Kenmare Street, New York, NY
Link to the storefront web
Research
Andrés Jaque, Paola Pardo. Fact Checking: Paola Pardo. Object Collection: Paola Pardo, Roberto González, Max Lauter, Coordination: Roberto González. Design: Laura Mora, Felipe Arango, Ayushi Drolia, Roberto García, Marta Jarabo, Pablo Maldonado, Solé Mallol, Valentina Marín. Cinematography and AV installation art: Miguel de Guzmán (Imagen Subliminal). Music Art: Emiliano Caballero. Episodes’ Videoart: Óscar Espín. Actress Voice Over: Elizabeth Sanjuan. Sound Studio: Robin Groove. Text Editing: Walter Ancarrow.
With the inestimable help of
Mauricio Trivino, Iván L. Munuera, Nerea Calvillo, Laura Kurgan, Valerie Renwick, Vera Scroggins, Bart-Jan Polman, Noelia Lecue, Jake Jaxson, J.R. Sebastian, Sharif Aggour, Joanna Angel, Charles Aubin, Cocky Boys, Matthew Bannister, Burning Angels, Lisa Caso, Douglas Crimp, D-Box, Josephine Dimiceli, Lisa S. Dozier, ECKELT GLASS GmBH, Michael Gruber, Dottie Hermann, ID Model Management, Miguel Núñez, Nancy Otavalo, Rafael Pelli, Pelli Clarke Pelli Architects, Joel Simkhai, Landis Smithers, Robin Standefer, John Zhang
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