Beauntrificate This. 2025.
As a trained architect, I once used white cardboard, specifically butter board, to construct speculative visions of the city. These models aimed to present
clarity, control, and optimism: the aesthetics of order imposed upon messy urban realities. With this project, Ireturn to that same material, not to project a
future, but to expose the invisible transformations already taking place in NYC. What once served to promote urban renewal now becomes a tool to interrogate it.
As a part of an ongoing project on beautification, this particular body of work investigates the early material signs of gentrification through a process that is both
forensic and aesthetic. I focus on what I consider a crucial but often overlooked gesture in the “beautification” of public space: the removal of graffiti. These
erasures are never total. The tiled surfaces, once marked with dissent or identity, retain shadows in their grout lines — chemical ghosts of prior inscriptions. In
these residual marks, I find a quiet yet powerful form of resistance: the city remembers what the planners try to forget.
Using silkscreen on butter board, I attempt to render these traces as images that are not fixed but temporal. The ink is absorbed into the cardboard’s surface with
minimal contrast, nearly disappearing at first glance. However, because this type of board is not UV-protected, the material begins to oxidize over time. As the
white surface yellows and darkens, the silk-screened image — once faint — slowly emerges. The process mirrors the way the city’s suppressed histories return,
not through loud confrontation, but through persistent material memory.
This representational technique creates what I call non-functioning architectural models. They no longer promise futures; instead, they map out failed erasures. The
cardboard, fragile and disposable, offers a direct contrast to the polished surfaces of the gentrified city — facades of permanence that mask social displacement. In
this reversal, the tools of architectural idealization are redeployed to document absence, loss, and the violence of transformation.
By allowing the image to emerge through decay, I resist the logic of beautification itself — the compulsion to clean, to smooth, to neutralize. What remains visible in
these works is not just what was once written on the wall, but the ideological effort to remove it. This is the aesthetic residue of gentrification, inscribed not in monu-
mental gestures, but in the quiet persistence of what refuses to be fully erased.