Sarah Nicholls, “City Made of Words”

Artist Statement

City Made of Words is a response to Le Corbusier’s The Radiant City. One of the most influential architects of the twentieth century, the Radiant City was designed to be a ordered, rational metropolis of the future. It was ambitious, and a complete blueprint not only for a new urban environment but also for social reform. Gone was the architecture of the past, in favor of vertical high-rises, manicured green spaces between residential towers, and expressways.

City Made of Words is a meditation on the distance between rhetoric and action. It explores how , in the US, Le Corbusier’s architectural theory combined with federal legislation to give birth to urban renewal. This policy initiative brought in bulldozers to demolish the homes of working class and low income New Yorkers, in order to make room for new housing for new residents with higher incomes, or for the expressways that would eventually funnel many people out of the city entirely. Former residents were promised help to find new housing, which often did not materialize. The book also considers the ways that the present housing crisis in NYC layers on top of previous waves of displacement.

This book is one of a series of publications made over the course of a year of research into the history of affordable housing and tenant movements in NYC. It includes selected pieces of text from Le Corbusier's work, presented as a ghostly pressure-printed layer in the background, running behind the main narrative of the book, which describes the effects of urban renewal on working class neighborhoods. Interspersed throughout are riso printed photographs of urban renewal projects and new construction zones throughout the city. Layered, overprinted wood type represents the layering of past and present in the built environment, as well as the ways that architectural theory creates an ideal city out of words.

sarah nicholls

New York, USA
https://www.sarahnicholls.com

City Made of Words
2026

Letterpress, riso, monoprinting, pressure printing, foil stamping

17" x 6" x 1"

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