Victorious

“I think that first became evident to me when the 2004 Republican National Convention was held in New York and there was a lot of political protest. There were demonstrations in Union Square associated with that, and I saw the way in which people immediately went into the square and claimed it as a space to protest.

“The way that activity was accepted and encouraged was really interesting because I hadn’t seen that side of the square. When I saw it happen again at regular intervals, I realised, ‘Okay, it’s not just an exciting, attractive local amenity. It has this larger national character’.”

Joanna’s book charts how that character evolved, and the attempts made along the way to reshape it.

The square was designed in 1830 to beautify a residential neighbourhood and boost property values, but by the early days of the American Civil War (1861–1865) it had become a place for political debate and protest.

In the late nineteenth century, the square was redesigned to enhance its potential for orderly expression of public sentiment.

“What attracted me to study the square in the first place was Frederick Law Olmsted, one of the most famous landscape architects in American history. He’s known primarily as the designer of Central Park, which is one of the first large-scale public urban parks and is always associated with democracy. But the democratic use of that space is about everybody being able to partake of leisure. What was fascinating to me is Olmsted also designed the plaza at Union Square, and he had a totally different idea of what public space was there, which was to create an open forum people could use for public meetings.

“The actual design and architecture of the plaza is pretty insubstantial. There’s nothing particularly elaborate or sophisticated about it. But just setting that space aside at that point in time, 1872, was radical; it gave a space to voices that didn’t have a place to protest before. Labour groups, in particular.”

More recently, the farmers’ market and other forms of gentrification have played a similar dampening role.

But whatever official intentions for the square have been, the public has always had the last say.

“What’s amazing to me writing the book is the degree to which the square’s association with public protest persists, even through more than a century of efforts to supress it or to make it available for only very benign activities. It does continue to have that association as a place where protest is welcomed.”

Joanna published a short article on the square in 2009 and spent the next 10 years researching and writing Design for the Crowd.

Her first book was Chicago 1890: The Skyscraper and the Modern City (University of Chicago Press, 2009) and she is now working on a book looking at Chicago as the background of the term ‘conspicuous consumption’, coined at the end of the nineteenth century by University of Chicago economist Thorstein Veblen.

And how did this New Zealander come to be an expert in American architectural history?

We can thank her poor French.

“When I did my Master’s degree in Canada, I wrote about a French architect and my initial hope was to carry on that work, but I realised my French was not good enough to do really detailed academic work on French texts.

“So I transferred to America in a similar period, the mid to late nineteenth century, and I just got really interested in researching New York and Chicago at that time. The whole idea that the modern city was born in the US is such an important idea in architectural history. To investigate the origins of the modern city in situ, studying for my PhD at Princeton University, was really exciting.”