Conclusion: The Invisible Architecture of New York

Summary

This book has traced the figure of invisible architecture, in its combination of the hidden, the mobile and the transparent, across a range of nineteenth-century writers, cities and spatial forms. Throughout, I have attempted to show how apparently disparate features of urban space, and the drives that accompany them, gain new significance when read together as dimensions of this larger spatial complex. I have also sought to expand the ways we might think about architecture in relation to urban space and literature, moving beyond its most straightforward and obvious manifestations. Yet although I have proposed invisible architecture as a concept associated with modernity (which is itself, of course, not a stable or singular notion), it is not only applicable to the nineteenth century, nor to the cities and writers I have discussed. In this Conclusion I offer one example of how the ideas and approaches pursued in this book might be extended to another context, that of twentieth- and twenty-first-century New York. Applications to global and historical contexts at a greater remove from the texts I have discussed would also be possible, but New York since 1900 offers a combination of literary, cultural and architectural connections to, alongside divergences from, the concerns of this book that make it a fitting place to carry my readings one step further. I take as a starting point Christoph Lindner's claim that in New York, ‘the modern city does not disappear or perish in the era of globalization, but is subsumed and reconfigured’. If this is so, the question becomes: which features of invisible architecture are preserved or reconfigured in an increasingly globalised New York, and in what ways? In offering a provisional response to this question, this Conclusion begins to articulate how invisible architecture might continue to be of use beyond the primary framework in which I have developed it.

The examples that follow are necessarily highly selective. If New York is, as Kenneth Goldsmith's 2015 reimagining of the Arcades Project has it, the capital of the twentieth century, as Paris was of the nineteenth for Benjamin (and it has at least a reasonable claim to the title), then I cannot possibly do it justice here.