Introduction

Astor Place reimagined... 2,678 miles from New York City.

Black Rock City, built (and then removed) annually in the Nevada desert during Burning Man, is considered by many of its inhabitants to be a civic experiment.  It's an opportunity to try on, for a week, a different way of relating to the environment, and to each other.  Many of BRC's inhabitants, however, would like to bring some aspects of this experiment back home with them. 

The Astor Place Imagined project might be considered an extraordinarily literal expression of this impulse.

The basic idea: we built a public plaza, a replica of New York's renowned Astor Place, in BRC.  (Adjustments were made, of course, for the temporary nature of the installation and the environmental constraints of the Black Rock Desert.)  In contrast to NYC's Astor Place, however, BRC's embodied the principles of the Livable Streets movement, as promoted by the New York City Streets Renaissance campaign.  The intent was to inspire change in the permanent Astor Place, as well as to awaken people to the potential for change in public spaces elsewhere.

We extended an invitation for involvement to other artists from the greater Burning Man  community, especially those within New York City.  We hope that others will work alongside our urban design goals to influence and implement aspects of the aesthetic design.  This would have an additional benefit of generating some familiarity among these artists with the principles of public space design for which we advocate.