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RECLAMATION
August 31 - November 15, 2008
Museum De Paviljoens, SITE 2F7
Outdoors and open to the public at all times
about
metropolis
introduction
images
directions
newspaper
brochure
advertisement
lincoln school
links & thanks
Made possible by
the Jan van Eyck Academie
and Museum De Paviljoens
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Reclamation is a reproduction
of the last remaining façade from the ghost town
of Metropolis,
USA. The Lincoln School, completed in 1913, has almost completely
crumbled to the ground - only the front entrance remains as the
solitary structure
against a wide horizon dusted with sagebrush.
Pockmarked with bullet holes and
corroding in the harsh desert
weather, this entrance still stands upright in the
shape of an
arch.
The archway is reconstructed at 1:1 scale as a public outdoor
architectural
installation in Almere, the Netherlands. A three-dimensional
replica of the
decaying Lincoln School is clad with detailed photographs
of the original.
The work is a combination of architecture, photography
and sculpture, and is
fabricated from standard outdoor advertising
and construction materials. Rather
than the traditional use of
a photograph as a window, here photographs are
employed as a map
of surfaces.
Elements of the original promotional campaign for Metropolis are
available at
Museum
De Paviljoens, including a reprinting of the original brochure
for
Metropolis, titled The Pacific Reclamation Company, and a
reproduction of
selected covers of the town's promotional newspaper,
the Metropolis Chronicle.
These republications portray Metropolis
in the words of its founders while giving
insight into the life
of its tightly knit community. They serve as documents of city
life, planning and marketing, on the cusp of the absorption of
photography into
the mechanics of advertising.
Reclamation is sited on F7, the last remaining undeveloped plot
of land in
Almere's city center. Almere is a planned city established
in the 1970s and still
under construction. The city is located
on land reclaimed from the former
Zuiderzee, an area originally
intended for agriculture. Almere was established
following the
population expansion in nearby Amsterdam, and has boomed
from
a population of 52 in 1970, to more than 180,000 in 2008, while
continuing
to expand rapidly. Almere is known as a "leisure city"
for its expansive parks and
recreation facilities. From an early
stage it was conceived of as a city of 90%
single family dwellings
- a type of housing which the largest Dutch cities distinctly
lack, and a powerful draw for new residents.
Both Almere and Metropolis are land reclamation projects, but
in opposite
circumstances - the first a sea, and the second a
desert. As "new" land, they
attract settlement via the allure
of a real-estate frontier, with hints of utopia.
In order to draw
a population to settle a frontier, each city has had to craft
its
own image.
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