Shoreline: Remembering a Waterfront Vision at El Museo
by
Cliff Parks Jr.
Shoreline at El Museo. Photo: Nando Alvarez-Perez.
The illuminating and heartbreaking exhibition Shoreline: Remembering a Waterfront Vision, organized by Bryan Lee and Barbara Campagna and on display at El Museo, serves as a spirited defense of the Brutalist movement as represented by architect Paul Rudolph, and a painful history in miniature of the Buffalo that was, is, and, frustratingly, never came to be. Through still photographs, architectural drawings, archival material, video installations, and sculpture, Shoreline explores the life, times, and bitter end of one of the area’s most contentious architectural projects: the Shoreline Apartments which ran from Carolina Street along Niagara Street to right behind Buffalo’s Art Deco City Hall.
Designed by Modernist architect Paul Rudolph and completed in 1974, the Shoreline provided affordable housing in the downtown area along the Buffalo waterfront for a diverse community of residents for almost 45 years. Along with Rudolph’s Earl W. Brydges Public Library in Niagara Falls, the Shoreline is the perfect embodiment of Brutalism at its best: earnestly utopian aspirations elegantly expressed in bold, stark angles of exposed concrete. But as the exhibition traces, the project would eventually fall victim to poor management, evolving urban development priorities, and, to a lesser extent, shifting tastes in architecture.
Grainy 35mm photos provide understated but powerful glimpses into the lives sheltered by the Shoreline in its 1970s heyday. Shiny, brand-new interiors highlight the promise that Modernism offered Shoreline residents–the promise of a classless, ever-evolving, and self-perfecting future now. Tender photographs of senior citizens acclimating to their new environs and smiling African American and Latinx kids riding their banana seat bikes in their new neighborhood illustrate the variety of experiences in this shared community while more recent images document its eventual and ongoing demolition.
Shoreline at El Museo. Photo: Nando Alvarez-Perez.
Situated at the heart of the exhibition, the melancholic video installation Learning From Buffalo (2018) underscores the institutional neglect and mounting disrepair that brought the Shoreline down while providing space for the people who once lived there to share their words and memories, incorporating their voices into this vital record. In Then and Now (2018), by Avye Alexandres the ruins of a glorious future are catalogued in haunting video clips capturing the decay that consumed Rudolph’s creation, while interviews with residents offer grim insights into what life was like during the Shoreline’s fading glory days.
Kurt Treeby, Exploded View. Photo: Nando Alvarez-Perez.
Shoreline also features two works by fiber artist Kurt Treeby that are affecting, elegiac, and justifiably bitter. Disposable (2016) renders a segment of the Shoreline as a usable Kleenex dispenser. Riffing on the funereal aspect of this exhibition, the disposable nature of facial tissue is equated with the cavalier attitude the white elites who ultimately presided over the end of the housing complex toward its final residents. Exploded View (2019) is a Rudolph model expressed in dreams and memory, its intricate, ghostlike translucency honoring the masterwork that the Shoreline could have been.
Indeed, the unfulfilled potential of Rudolph’s vision screams at the audience through his monumental yet oneiric architectural drawings. The Shoreline was originally but a small part of a massive waterfront development. This series of seven sweeping high-rise apartment buildings surrounding a futuristic marina would have gloriously redefined the city and its waterfront when it needed it most: during the deindustrialization of the 1970s and 80s. For whatever reason–perhaps the idea of situating luxury developments adjacent to low-income housing was too radical for Buffalo at the time–authorities did not move forward with the full plan, focusing only on the Shoreline, which would immediately become controversial and would remain so for the duration of its existence.
Kurt Treeby, Disposable. Photo: Nando Alvarez-Perez.
This large-scale perspective drawing of the Buffalo waterfront that never was is spectacular and heartbreaking in equal measure. Installed strategically behind Treeby’s Exploded View, it is an ethereal elegy to Rudolph’s thwarted vision for the city of Buffalo and for a version of the Shoreline that now exists only in memory and in gallery exhibitions defending and preserving the Brutalist tradition. That Rudolph’s original vision is not altogether unlike the cutting edge Googleopolis proposed in Toronto’s latest round of waterfront redevelopment merely adds insult to injury.
It’s the thwarted dreams depicted in this exhibition that make it so affecting, whether Rudolph’s dreams of a masterplan for the Buffalo waterfront or the dreams of a better life the Shoreline offered to the residents who lived there until their homes were deemed “too far gone” as a result of institutional neglect and finally removed from the map altogether. Curators Bryan Lee and Barbara Campagna home in on what is truly important: the pioneering vision of the Shoreline’s architect and the community that called these apartments home.
Cliff Parks Jr. is a concerned citizen, activist, and troublemaker. Parks writes primarily about music but is currently in the process of branching out.
