Misleading Innocence

The CCA presents a curatorial project by Francesco Garutti based on the controversial story of the planning and politics of the bridges that span the parkways of Long Island, New York.

The Canadian Centre for Architecture presents a curatorial project by Francesco Garutti based on the controversial story of the planning and politics of a series of overpasses that span the parkways of Long Island, New York.

These bridges were commissioned in the 1920s and 1930s by the influential American public administrator Robert Moses. The story suggests that the bridges were designed expressly to prevent the passage of buses, thereby only allowing people who could afford to own a car to access Long Island’s leisure spaces

The story was made public for the first time in 1974 in the Pulitzer Prize-winning book by Robert Caro on the life of Robert Moses, The Power Broker. The political scientist Langdon Winner refers to Moses’s bridges in his seminal 1980 article, “Do Artifacts Have Politics?” and the story thus became a famous and influential case study. It is often cited by scholars interested in control through architecture or technical objects, and more generally in the relationships of mutual influence between technology, politics and society.

Still from “Misleading Innocence (tracing what a bridge can do)” © Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montréal, 2014. All rights reserved — Still from *Misleading Innocence (tracing what a bridge can do)*. © Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montréal, 2014. All rights reserved

Rejected by historians of American urban planning but endlessly mentioned as a parable in manuals, academic papers, texts of philosophy, material culture and science and technology studies, and in an infinity of blogs by researchers, this story was transformed and deformed in almost every reiteration and gave rise to a striking episode of “Chinese whispers” in an academic context.

The questions that the story raises are timelier now than ever before. They engage with issues of secrecy and control, the morals of power and the effects of technology. What is the relationship between politics and artifacts? How and to what degree can a project’s intentions be deliberately concealed? What are the deviously designed effects and the unplanned political consequences of the agency of the artifacts that surround us?

Consisting of a film, a discussion with scholars Albena Yaneva and Stephen Graham and a digital publication, the project was developed by Garutti while in residence at the CCA as Emerging Curator 2013–2014. The film, Misleading Innocence (tracing what a bridge can do), was conceived and developed by Francesco Garutti and directed by Shahab Mihandoust. It features interviews with Bernward Joerges, Bruno Latour, Langdon Winner and Steve Woolgar, all participants in the scholarly debate that the story of the bridges produced in the 1980s and 1990s.

The digital publication, entitled Can Design Be Devious? The story of the Robert Moses bridges over the Long Island parkways, and other explorations of unexpected political consequences of design, expands on the complexity of the topic and the elusiveness of clear answers by presenting objects and documents that Garutti encountered during his research. Contributions from Matthew Gandy, Stephen Graham, Anthony Hudek and Albena Yaneva deepen the analysis and widen the scope beyond the case of the bridges.

We invite you to view the trailer, in advance of the release of the film and the digital publication on iTunes and the Google Play Store in October 2015.

Misleading Innocence

The CCA presents a curatorial project by Francesco Garutti based on the controversial story of the planning and politics of the bridges that span the parkways of Long Island, New York.

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