In 1889, when workers were excavating a section of New York City’s Washington Square Park to lay the foundation for a marble arch, no one expected to dig up the remains of human bodies. But they did, and only about 10 feet underground. Although it was known that the space was once used as a potter’s field, the exact number and location of those buried had long been forgotten. Detailed information about who was buried and where had not been recorded. After all, this potter’s field was a short-term solution to a public health crisis. When it was built in the early 19thcentury, New York City was in the throes of the yellow fever epidemic. The City needed a place to bury the growing number of poor and unidentified victims. They chose this section of farmland outside of the city centre, far from view. Bodies were dumped unceremoniously in mass graves.
It is estimated that the remains of more than 20,000 bodies remain buried under Washington Square Park—a number that, to this day, the majority of visitors remain completely oblivious to. Despite the park’s present pleasantries, which include folk musicians, chess games, pétanque play, as well as the ornate march arch laid in 1889 commemorating the inauguration of George Washington, a layer of tragedy rests underneath. The rose flowers that line the underbelly of the marble arch commemorate both victory and vicissitude.
What makes a city space meaningful? In urban metropolises around the world, there are hundreds of millions of “spaces” – internally stable spatial moments – from public parks, to private courtyards, to street corners that could be considered meaningful. Yet, only a minutia of these spaces are considered to hold psychological and emotional significance – meaning – for most of the general public. Washington Square Park is one of these spaces, as are Hyde Park in London, Tahrir Square in Cairo, and the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin. Clearly, the meaning these spaces hold cannot be reduced to their respective objective characteristics, such as their architectural features, number of trees, seating options, or the quality of their weather. Rather, it would seem, their meaning emerges from an interplay between the space’s objective characteristics and its conceptual connotations, including references to any historical events of cultural or political significance that have unfolded in the space.
According to the cognitive scientists Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner, conceptual blending is a cognitive mechanism that allows the human mind to combine – or blend – multiple objective and conceptual inputs to create emergent meaning. Fauconnier and Turner argue that this mechanism powers some of the human mind’s most meaningful outputs, including artistic creation, technological innovation, and scientific discovery. What has been given less attention, however, is how conceptual blends offer a lens through which meaningful city spaces around the world can be understood, as well as a method through which meaningful city spaces can be created.
It is undeniable that Washington Square Park holds profound meaning for many New Yorkers. Millions of them, along with just as many tourists, flock to the park every year. On the east end, students lounge on grassy alcoves under the shade of the elm trees, discussing contemporary political and cultural events. On the west end, chess wizzes taunt passerbys to test their mettle on the board. And in the middle, crowds congregate around a circular fountain surrounded by black stone benches to cool off and listen to the buskers serenade underneath the marble arch. It is one of the few places in New York City where every social strata and cultural heritage blend together in a shared space, all of whom are drawn by the park’s objective characteristics which undeniably supply the space with meaning.
People celebrating Pride in Washington Square Park. (Ryan Rahman/Pacific Press/Shutterstock).
Although insightful, limiting Washington Square Parks meaning to its objective characteristics belies its conceptual import. Conceptual meaning, in comparison to objective meaning, is a product of the mind whereas objective meaning is an entity in the world. In the case of Washington Square Park, any meaningful historical narratives about the space, including its former function as a potter’s field, is part of the space’s conceptual meaning. While each of these events unfolded in the real world, understanding them in the present moment requires they be represented as mental concepts in the mind. As is the case with Washington Square Park, a short walk through history shows that there has been a wide range of meaningful historical events that have occurred that supply the space with conceptual meaning.
For example, there is the story about the role Washington Square Park played in the labour rights movement of the early 20th century. It was in the park where, on September 2nd, 1912, approximately 20,000 people marched to commemorate the deaths of 146 workers killed in a fire at a factory only a couple blocks away. The protesters demanded better labour conditions for the city’s working class. The workers were killed in the fire because the managers of the factory had the right to lock the exits to prevent employees from leaving during the day. This public protest that took place in Washington Square Park is credited with triggering legislative changes mandating improved factory working conditions and safety standards. Or, there is the story about the role Washington Square Park played in the development of human-centred urban planning, exemplified by the battle between Robert Moses and Jane Jacobs. In this battle, Moses, New York City’s Planning Commissioner, proposed extending 5th Avenue straight through the park, which was a paved parking lot at the time, to connect it to lower Manhattan. This car-centric proposal ultimately failed thanks to the savvy activism of local residents, prominent among which was Jane Jacobs, who argued that Washington Square Park, and city streets more generally, should respond to the needs of the pedestrian before they respond to the needs of the car. Jacobs used the event as inspiration for her 1961 book Death and Life of Great American Cities, a seminal text for human-centred urban planning. Or, there is the story about the role the park played in the beat and folk movements of the 1950s, 60s, and 70s. During this era, little-known poets and musicians like Pete Seeger, Allen Ginsberg, Jimmy Hendrix, and Bob Dylan would perform in and around Washington Square Park. In this space, these artists would test out new material and techniques that would one day make each of these artists known around the world. Or, there is the story about the role Washington Square Park played in the gay rights movement of the early 1970s, hosting many public rallies and speeches by local activists and serving as both the start and end point of multiple pride parades. Or, there is the story about the role the space plays for politicians launching political campaigns, such as Elizabeth Warren and Barack Obama, who have hosted rallies underneath the park’s storied marble arch.
Note. [1] Cars, Washington Square Park, Aerial View, circa 1960-69. Image via NYU Local.[2] Bette Midler at the Gay Liberation March 1973. Image via WSP Conservancy.[3] Barack Obama Rally, Sept. 27 2007. Image via NY Daily News.
Each of these meaningful historical events that have occurred in Washington Square Park supply the space with conceptual meaning. But as was the case with Washington Square Park’s objective meaning, limiting the space’s meaning to historical narratives about the space – its conceptual meaning – fails to capture its full import. Instead, it is throughblending between the objective and conceptual domains that Washington Square Park’s most meaningful moments emerge.
Before applying Conceptual Blend Theory to urban spaces, it is first important to understand what the theory claims. Conceptual Blend Theory offers a model through which to explain the emergence of insightful thought. The fundamental unit of this model is the mental space. Mental spaces are defined as small conceptual packets constructed as we experience the world around us, as well as when we think and talk, such as mental images, schemata, or narratives, that help with local understanding and action. A conceptual blend starts with at least two mental spaces, termed input spaces, that are held concurrently in working memory. These two input spaces are linked to one another by a generic space, which is a third mental space that features what the two input spaces have in common. The crucial part of a conceptual blend is the fourth space—the blend. In the blend, unique elements from each input space are linked together, creating relations that did not exist in either input separately, allowing for new forms of meaning to emerge.
Note. This model was produced by Fauconnier and Turner in 1998 and provides a schematic for Conceptual Blend Theory. From Fauconnier, G., & Turner, M. (1998). Conceptual integration networks. Cognitive science, 22(2), 133-187.
To illustrate the conceptual blending process, Fauconnier and Turner cite a riddle first forwarded by Arthur Koestler in his 1964 book The Act of Creation. The riddle goes as follows:
A Buddhist monk begins at dawn one day walking up a mountain, reaches the top at sunset, meditates at the top for several days until one dawn when he begins to walk back to the foot of the mountain, which he reaches at sunset, Making no assumptions about his starting or stopping or about his pace during the trips, prove that there is a place on the path which he occupies at the same hour of the day on the two separate journeys.
It is impossible to solve this riddle simply by imagining the monk’s journey up and down the mountain in one sequence. Rather, a blended space formed from two input spaces must be conceived. One input represents the monk’s journey up the mountain, while the other input represents the monk’s downward journey. In the blended space, it becomes possible to imagine a place and time where both monks meet, offering a clear solution to the riddle. In other words, the solution to the riddle is an emergent property of the conceptual blend. The blend also offers multiple opportunities for elaboration. In the blend, we can imagine the monks greeting one another, discussing their respective journeys, and even turning to the viewer to reply back with the answer to the riddle. Each imaginative demonstrates that the blend becomes more than the sum of its parts.
In the monk’s riddle, both input spaces are imaginary events simulated by whoever is trying to solve the riddle. But the inputs to conceptual blends don’t have to be imaginary. They can also be events that have occurred throughout history. To illustrate this capability, Fauconnier and Turner offer the example of an illustration from a 1999 New York Times article reporting that a runner named Hicham el-Guerrouj had broken the record for the mile. In this illustration, el-Guerrouj is leading a race with five other figures on it, each one representing the fastest milers from every decade since Roger Bannister broke the 4-minute barrier in 1954. The illustration shows el-Guerrouj crossing the finish while Bannister, the slowest of the pack, is 120 yards back. This illustration is a physical representation of a conceptual blend with historical inputs. It blends together six separate input mental spaces — the six runners — and places them on a shared track. Through this blend, we are able to imagine a race where all the fastest runners from each decade compete against each other. The emergent meaning that is produced by the blend is the insight into how fast the sport has progressed over six short decades, with el-Guerrouj "defeating" Bannister by 120 yards.
Note. This image was produced by the New York Times in 1999 and illustrates the history of the world record in the mile. From Fauconnier, G., & Turner, M. (2003). Polysemy and conceptual blending. Polysemy: Flexible patterns of meaning in mind and language, 79-94.
According to Fauconnier and Turner, conceptual blending is a cognitive mechanism that powers some of the human mind’s most meaningful outputs including artistic creation, technological innovation, and scientific discovery. For example, abstract painters often start with a familiar experience as input and blend it with another input to produce an image with emergent meaning. Pablo Picasso would paint faces and people – something familiar – and blend them with multiple additional viewpoints of those people. In his 1907 painting Demoiselles d’Avignon, Picasso depicted five women but layered in multiple viewpoints from different angles. Because of this blend, Demoiselles d’Avignon generates emergent meaning about the stability of female identity and sexuality as it is perceived through society’s multiple vantage points. Conceptual blending can also power technological innovation. In the early 1980s, computer designers were faced with a serious design problem. They had built incredibly powerful computational tools but were struggling to design an interface that the public, many of whom had no prior experience with computing devices, could use effectively. Instead of forcing users to learn an entirely new system to interface with the computer, the designers created a conceptual blend that for one input space used the logic of a system most people were already familiar with: the office desktop. On an office desktop, users are able to point, grasp, and move around objects on a two-dimensional surface. The computer designers used experiences with real-world office desktops as inputs to a conceptual blend with a simulated two-dimensional digital space as the other input. The blend – the “computer desktop” – then has its own emergent structure where users are able to make sense of how to point to and move objects positioned on a simulated two-dimensional space similar to how they would point to and move objects on the surface of a real desk. The computer desktop interface is successful because it recruits an existing and robust knowledge base of work in a real office space as an input into a conceptual blend. Blending what is known with what is unknown has also powered scientific discovery. It was through a conceptual blend between the known and the unknown that August Kekulé, one of the most prominent chemists in Europe in the 19th century, came to understand the structure of benzene. As the story goes, it was during a dream that Kekulé saw a snake eating its own tail, which acted as an input space against which the structure of benzene could be mapped. From this blend, Kekulé was able to deduce that the structure contained a six-membered ring of carbon atoms with alternating single and double bonds.
These examples highlight the power of conceptual blends and demonstrate their utility stretches across disciplines and problem spaces. An important fact to emphasize about these blends is that each one uses a familiar concrete object of the world as one of its inputs and blends it with something less familiar to generate emergent insight on that unfamiliar topic. Picasso used faces to make a commentary about social identity, the computer designers of the 1980s used office workspaces to allow the public to understand how to use a computer, and Kekulé used a snake eating its tail to comprehend the molecular structure of benzene. This highlights the profound role physical objects in the world can play in conceptual blends. Indeed, although conceptual blends recruit imaginative and elaborative processes, they are often grounded in physical objects, also known as material anchors. Understanding American Sign Language (ASL), for example, is powered by instantaneously blending the physical gesture with prior knowledge of the meaning behind each gesture. ASL looks like random arm and hand movements to someone who has not learned the meaning behind each gesture but can be understood as an entire language by those that can complete the blend.
In a similar way, architecture and city spaces offer material anchors against which conceptual blends can be completed. The conceptual inputs can be diverse but the logic powering the blends is the same; cross-space mappings between material anchors and conceptual elements link the two spaces so that select elements from the inputs can be projected into a blended space with emergent properties. The benefit of using material anchors like architecture as input spaces is their stabilizing properties. Because they exist in the physical world, they stabilize what otherwise would simply be ephemeral acts of mental imagination. A gravestone, for example, stabilizes the memory of a deceased individual, which otherwise would have to rely on the memory capabilities of the mind. A church stabilizes what otherwise would be an abstract representation of God. Moreover, material anchors remain consistent over time, allowing numerous iterative blends of increasing complexities to be performed, where objects and concepts combine to prompt elaborate conceptual integration networks. In the case of Washington Square Park, something as complex and abstract as a city’s identity can be blended and iterated against the stability of the material anchor that is the park itself. Further, the cognitive effort required to iterate through multiple blends is reduced because of the stabilizing effect of the material anchor, thereby increasing intellectual accomplishment without unreasonable cognitive demands.
Indeed, in Washington Square Park there are a myriad of mental spaces – both experienced and conceptual – that can act as the input spaces for conceptual blends. Moreover, these input spaces can use the physical characteristics of Washington Square Park, including its size, orientation, and composition of elements, as the shared coordinates for the generic space. Then, from this composition, emergent meaning can be generated in the blend. For example, mentally visualizing that Washington Square Park was once a potter’s field acts as one input space for a conceptual blend, while enjoying the present pleasantries of the park can form another. In this blend, regular visitors are poignantly described as “oblivious” to the tens of thousands of bodies buried underneath the park and the marble flowers that line the arch’s underside now read as commemorative symbols to those buried below. Both of these descriptions are new forms of meaning not present in either input but emerge in the conceptual blend.
And the blending opportunities don’t have to stop here. The described blend uses only two aspects from Washington Square Park as inputs. As described, Washington Square Park has witnessed many more meaningful moments, any of which can serve as inputs to conceptual blends with their own unique emergent structures. For example, blending inputs of the park being used throughout history for public protests and political rallies generates the emergent meaning that the space acts as a mechanism that advances political thought. According to the emergent meaning offered by this blend, future public protests and political rallies are all the more poignant if they occur in Washington Square Park. Similarly, blending the input of the park being used as a performance space for numerous musicians who have gone on to be famous with the input of a musician playing today generates the emergent meaning that whomever you hear performing in the park today may go on to be someone the whole world listens to. Collapsing cause and effect to such a radical degree is only possible in the blend.
Conceptual Blend Theory offers a useful model through which to explain Washington Square Park’s meaning, and its explanatory power does not end with this space. Rather, conceptual blend theory applies to other city spaces in which multiple meaningful events have occurred, such as Times Square, Union Square, or Central Park, as well as beyond any one city space and to the entire city more generally. Across different time periods and neighbourhoods, New York City has witnessed some of America’s most meaningful cultural, social, and political moments, all of which can serve as inputs to a conceptual blend that share the generic space of the city. From positive events, such as countless post-war European immigrants starting new lives after years of suffering, to negative events like the Wall Street crash of 1929 or the attacks of September 11th, each one can be used as an input to a conceptual blend from which emergent meaning is generated. For example, blending New York City’s historical role in receiving post-war immigrants can serve as one input that links to another input representing the current influx of migrants the city receives from Central American countries. In this blend, the emergent interpretation would be that part of New York City’s reputation is to receive migrants, which is a rhetorical strategy used by multiple politicians. This rhetorical strategy generates its meaning by blending a historical narrative about New York City with a present condition.
The idea that a city’s meaning is composed of a blend of multiple historical narratives is not new. In her Infinite Cities series, the author Rebeca Solnit combines personal, political, and ecological narratives with maps to demonstrate how one city can have an infinite number of lived experiences that when visualized together overlap to generate emergent meaning. In one map, Solnit visualizes the locations of San Franciscan shipyards used to build warships for World War II alongside African-American political and musical landmarks. In doing so, the economic opportunities that triggered the Great Migration are connected to the cultural contributions made by African-Americans to the city. In this blend, a poignant causal link emerges. The title of Solnit’s book is an interpolation of Italo Calvino’s 1972 novel Invisible Cities. In this novel, Calvino uses descriptions of fifty-five cities, including their architecture, their inhabitants, and their economies, as conceptual blends from which a narrative about culture, time, memory, and death emerges. As if already aware of the power of conceptual blending in cities, Calvino wrote: “The city must never be confused with the words that describe it. And yet between one and the other there is a connection.”
Note. This image was produced by Seigel 2010 and provides a visualization of San Francisco shipyards and African-American cultural spaces. From Solnit, R. (2010). Infinite city: a San Francisco atlas. Univ of California Press.
Most of the examples of conceptual blending offered so far are characterized by a blend between a historical event and a present condition. But the input spaces to conceptual blends don’t always have to be rooted in the past. They can also draw inputs from the present moment. For example, juxtaposing contrasting elements in a photograph, which is an effective strategy for creating meaningful and memorable images, is a form of conceptual blending where both inputs are drawn from the same moment. The same process can occur to generate emergent meaning in cities. Protesting against capitalism on Wall Street – the symbolic and literal centre point of American capitalism – as they did during the Occupy Wall Street protests is more meaningful than protesting in any other part of the city because of the emergent meaning generated by juxtaposing two seemingly contradictory inputs. In this juxtaposition, the wealth and power gaps between capitalist institutions and the general public achieve a level of salience that would not be replicated if either of these inputs occurred isolated from one another. Similarly, returning to Washington Square Park, occupants from different social strata and cultural heritages who cohabitate in the space offer a myriad of inputs for conceptual blends that generate emergent meaning. New York City is known for being a culturally diverse city, but this cultural diversity achieves a remarkable degree of salience when observed contemporaneously in a blend. A similar idea was forwarded in Rem Koolhaas’ infamous 1978 manifesto Delirious New York. In this manifesto, Koolhaas coins the term “culture of congestion” to describe the way Manhattan’s skyscrapers layer multiple distinct architectural typologies on top of one another, epitomized by the quote “eating oysters with boxing gloves, naked, on the 9th floor”. It was this culture of congestion, Koolhaas argued, that distinguished New York City from previous metropolises around the world which have greater separations between use cases. Koolhaas’ analysis accords with Conceptual Blend Theory; that is, through blending seemingly disparate concepts like eating oysters and boxing, a new form of meaning emerges. And it is the infinite blends offered by New York City’s kaleidoscope of typologies that make the city meaningful. In fact, the language of emergence is written into the city itself, with several neighbourhoods named after blends of other spatial indicators. Tribeca, Soho, Nolita, and Dumbo are all names that emerged from conceptual blends of existing geographic indicators.
Note. Occupy Wall Street protestors marching past Federal Hall on Wall Street, Sept. 26, 2011. Louis Lanzano/AP Photo.
In addition to offering a theoretical lens through which meaningful urban spaces can be explained, Conceptual Blend Theory also offers insight into why some urban spaces fail to become meaningful. Some new spaces, despite their immaculate nature, can feel like they lack a positive phenomenological experience. They are sometimes described with words like “cold” or “sterile” or – at worst – “hostile” and “dehumanizing”. Words like these have been used to describe the Hudson Yards project, a newly built $25 billion development located between the Chelsea and Hell's Kitchen neighbourhoods. Despite its immaculate nature, Hudson Yards has been roundly criticized for its inhospitable design. Michael Kimmelman, the Architectural Critic for the New York Times wrote it “epitomizes a skin-deep view of architecture as luxury branding.” The site itself is composed of six skyscrapers, all glass and steel, one performance venue, a mall, and a piece of public art that are all compacted together across a meagre 28 acres. Although all of the skyscrapers are built out of the same materials, they are stylized in radically different ways without a clear reference to one another. Thomas Woltz, whose firm Nelson Byrd Woltz Landscape Architects designed the public plaza, calledHudson Yards a cocktail party of “mastodons, pineapples, sheds, swizzlesticks and bubble mats.” Conceptual Blend Theory offers new insight into why Hudson Yards is not experienced as meaningful. According to Conceptual Blend Theory, emergent meaning is generated when two disparate inputs are blended together in a shared mental space. At Hudson Yards, the architecture makes little reference to any historical narratives that have occurred in the space. In fact, the entirety of the old space – a railway yard – is covered and rendered invisible by the new development. For this reason, conceptual blends between the past and the present are not unobservable in the architecture itself. Similarly, the buildings themselves are similar enough to one another that they fail to provide enough contrast from which to generate poignant emergent meaning in a blend. Bill Pedersen, the co-founding partner of Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates, one of the architectural firms involved in the project, likened the building to “elephants dancing”. This judgement is indeed a form of emergent meaning generated from a blend of the six skyscrapers as input spaces, but it is clearly not a positive assessment of inputs. The skyscrapers do not, for example, leverage the principles of juxtaposition where emergent meaning is generated by curating a clear contrast between elements of a scene. A similar phenomenon is experienced in another Manhattan neighbourhood, the Upper East Side. Like Hudson Yards, the Upper East Side is often described as staid and boring. And, like Hudson Yards, and unlike Washington Square Park, few historic events that have shaped the city’s cultural, social, or political fabric have occurred in the Upper East Side, offering little content for conceptual blends that combine the past and the present. Moreover, the neighbourhood is often described as being architecturally homogeneous, as well as lacking economic and cultural diversity. Again, these characteristics limit the ability to construct conceptual blends that generate emergent meaning, given the input spaces lack significant distinctions.
Note. From Hudson Yards [Photograph], by Anita Gould, 2019, Flickr (https://flic.kr/p/2g3ekmG). CC BY-NC 2.0
In light of using Conceptual Blend Theory to explain why some city spaces fail to be experienced as meaningful, it is important to ask: how can Conceptual Blend Theory guide the creation of meaningful architectural and urban design? For the most part, language has been the focus of the application of conceptual blend theory. In this context, the theory emphasizes the role blending disparate concepts that share some link plays in generating emergent meaning. This same paradigm can apply to architectural design. In architectural design, architects work with multiple distinct architectural typologies, historical references, aesthetic trends, and use cases, each of which can be used as an input space for a conceptual blend. For example, incorporating historical references with modern design can be used as input spaces for a conceptual blend. This approach was expertly executed by SHoP architects in their design of the Brooklyn Tower, located in Downtown Brooklyn. The tower is designed as a hexagonal shape that references the shape of the Dime Savings Bank building; a historic building located at the base of the tower. The tower’s façade features multiple vertical highlights that cascade down from setbacks that shape a series of interlocking forms, reminiscent of New York City’s Art Deco aesthetic trend that dominated architectural design of the early 20th century. It is clad in stone, bronze, and black stainless steel that juxtaposes against the majority of Manhattan’s modern skyscrapers – including those at Hudson Yards – that are almost exclusively glass and steel. By blending historical references with contemporary design and juxtaposing itself against its Manhattan peers, the Brooklyn Tower achieves a sense of emergent meaning not present in less successful projects such as the Hudson Yards.
Note. The Brooklyn Tower [Photograph], by Kidfly182, 2022, Wikimedia Commons. (https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/36/The_Brooklyn_Tower_010.jpg).CC BY-SA 4.0
Another example of the success of Conceptual Blend Theory in architecture is observable in the High Line. The High Line is an elevated parkway located on the west side of Manhattan that stretches between 11th Street in the Meatpacking District to 34th Street on the north end of Chelsea. The High Line was formerly a railway that transported commodities like milk, meat, produce, and raw and manufactured goods between factories in a part of Manhattan that was primarily used for industry. It shut down in the 1980s due to an overall transition from delivering goods via railway to trucking, but the physical infrastructure was left in place. Over time, native plants and grasses overtook the High Line and began to look less like an industrial railway and more like a nature reserve. Local residents took notice and started using the space for recreation. The High Line was a local secret until 1999 when City officials made plans to demolish the structure. In response, community organizers advocated its preservation and reuse as a public open space. Their advocacy proved successful and the City began repurposing the railway into an urban park in 2006. Corner Field Operations, Diller Scofidio + Renfro, and Piet Oudolf collaborated on the design of the park, which integrates numerous features of the old railway. The architects left stretches of the track and ties in place to recall the High Line’s former use. Native plants like blazing stars, staghorn sumac, redbud and birch trees were planted to reference the untamed natural growth of the decommissioned High Line. These design interventions juxtapose against the more modern architectural styles of the surrounding area, including buildings by contemporary architects such as Renzo Piano, Jeanne Gang, Bjarke Ingels, and Zaha Hadid. Today, the High Line is one of New York City’s most popular attractions, drawing millions of visitors every year. Conceptual Blend Theory offers an insightful explanation as to why. According to this theory, integrating historical references into a modern design offers multiple blends from which to generate emergent meaning. The High Line is a contemporary park, but at the same time is a literal relic of New York City’s past. Normally these two inputs would seem irreconcilable, but they are both true in the High Line, offering a material anchor against which multiple eras of the city’s past, as well as its modern present, can be blended.
Note. AHigh Line Park, Section 1a [Photograph], by Dansnguyen, 2012, Wikimedia Commons. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:AHigh_Line_Park,_Section_1a.jpg). CC0 1.0
Importantly, Fauconnier and Turner do not claim that conscious awareness is a necessary condition of conceptual blends. Rather, they argue, blending processes can occur outside of conscious awareness with only the emergent insight reaching conscious attention. Kekulé, for example, is said to have been lost in a dream when a vision of a snake eating its tail emerged in his mind’s eye. He had been working hard all day and took a short rest in front of his fireplace. After a full day of work, along with several years spent studying the nature of carbon-carbon bonds, his mind had plenty of inputs to subconsciously iterate blends with, eventually producing a eureka moment of insight without conscious thought. The meaning generated from the conceptual blends that draw inputs from urban and architectural environments is also reasoned to, at times, emerge from subconscious processing as opposed to conscious thought. The sensory modalities through which accumulate information about urban and architectural experience are multifaceted and dynamic, and don’t always recruit overt attention. For example, walking the cobblestone streets of Greenwich Village offers a textured and varied experience for the body’s proprioceptive system that can be processed without conscious awareness. Similarly, the smell of the oak trees that line the area’s streets, the gentle chatter of front stoop conversations among residents, or the brick detailing on the rows of townhouses may not trigger and recruit direct attention, but can still be registered as a sensory backdrop. Conceptual blends, then, can draw on a wide range of both overt and covert sensory inputs that can blend in the mind through conscious thought or unconscious processes. These blends could be complimented with historical narratives about the area, which include things we read in books, things we listen to in songs, and things we hear in passing.
Historical events play an important role in providing input spaces from which conceptual blends can occur. Because Washington Square was the location where multiple historical events unfolded, including massive labour protests, urban planning battles, musical performances, political rallies, and even acting as a potter’s field, the space has multiple inputs from which conceptual blends can be constructed. But the history of Washington Square Park stretches back even further than these events. Prior to the Dutch colonizing Manhattan in the early 17th century, the island was known as Manahatta – the island of many hills – to the Lenape people who first settled the land centuries prior. The Lenape established small villages in several locations around Manahatta, allowing them to hunt, fish, and gather food from what was then a rich woodland ecosystem. One such village was located right next to where Washington Square Park is today. Called Sapokanikan, this Lenape village is thought to have been used for cultivating tobacco, oyster harvesting, and fishing from a trout stream called Minetta Creek that ran alongside the settlement. Minetta Creek, one of the largest natural watercourses in Manahatta, ran south from where the Arch now stands through Washington Square Park and on toward the Hudson River. Minetta Street, located a few blocks south of the park, was built following the curvature of the creek’s original path. In fact, Minetta Creek’s unstoppable current still flows down West 3rd Street and on south toward the Hudson River today, albeit in a controlled draining system underground.
It is easy to forget the story of Sapokanikan’s and its Lenape inhabitants. No physical remnants of Sapokanikan remain today after the village and its inhabitants were violently displayed by the Dutch in 1633. It’s easy to forget that this space was once a quiet village next to a stream in a rich woodland ecosystem. Today, Washington Square Park is full of energy. Musicians host lively performances underneath the marble Arch as tourists walk by. Throngs of locals lounge in the shade of elm trees, sipping wine while discussing current events. Students shout slogans protesting the violent displacement of a nearby homeless population by the police, pouring down Minetta Street and flowing south toward city hall like an unstoppable current.