Ben Barsotti Scott, PLA
I’m a landscape architect licensed in the state of New York. I also curate exhibitions, primarily through a collaborative project called Bad Little Brother. And I’m a student of historical geography, currently researching a series of civilian-led blockades of US Navy terminals in the final years of the Vietnam War.
Occasionally, I’m also a teacher and critic at schools of art and architecture: see the syllabus for my 2022 undergraduate course on contemporary architectural theory here. Even more occasionally, I write for architecture and urban geography titles like the the New York Review of Architecture, Critical Planning Journal, and the Journal of Landscape Architecture. You can see my full CV here.
I live and work in New York City and commute every once in a while to New Jersey.
I post some of my recent and ongoing work on this site. If you’re interested in working together, you can contact me here.
Ben Barsotti Scott, PLA
I’m a landscape architect licensed in the state of New York. I also curate exhibitions, primarily through a collaborative project called Bad Little Brother. And I’m a student of historical geography, currently researching a series of civilian-led blockades of US Navy terminals in the final years of the Vietnam War.
Occasionally, I’m also a teacher and critic at schools of art and architecture: see the syllabus for my course on contemporary architectural theory here. Even more occasionally, my writing appears in architecture and urban geography outlets like the the New York Review of Architecture, Critical Planning Journal, and the Journal of Landscape Architecture. You can see my full CV here.
I live and work in New York City and commute every once in a while to New Jersey.
I post some of my recent and ongoing work on this site. If you’re interested in working together, you can contact me here.
RESEARCH
Late modernist hotel lobbies and
Midtown’s distended public space
2024︎︎︎present
I am currently developing a project on the architecture of hotel lobbies built in Midtown Manhattan between the 1960s and 80s. This project takes seriously Thomas Gieryn’s proposal that buildings stabilize social life but do so “imperfectly.” I approach the lobbies of the Marriott Marquis and the New York Hilton at Rockefeller Center as formal attempts to destabilize the continuum between street and bar that, according to George Chauncey, facilitated commercialized sex along 42nd Street and throughout the Theater District in the 20th century. Drawing on planning materials of the late 1960s through early 1990s, I suggest that urban buildings’ inability to resolve the contradictions of urban life offers a replenishing source of urban crises to be managed by a professionalizing class of city administrators. In this regard, I depart from Gieryn’s original assumption to suggest that, while buildings’ incompleteness opens up a space for transgression it also creates new sites for state power and surveillance.
