Assembly / Line
Finn Brunton
2026 Summer Residency
ABOUT THE PROJECT
Assembly / Line is about a building on Governors Island in Upper New York Bay, where the Hudson and East Rivers meet, just a few hundred yards from Manhattan and Brooklyn. It is the site of one of the strangest buildings in New York: Liggett Hall, originally Building 400, among the longest buildings in the world at the time of its construction. A habitable wall, a skyscraper set on its side, 400 was a barracks which housed 1,375 men, the entire 16th Infantry, in a single continuous structure. Assembly / Line puts this building into the context of a utopian movement to create buildings and technologies inspired by assembly lines, conveyor belts, film projectors, factory floors, drivetrains, racetracks, freeways, tickertape, zippers, time and motion study, and chronophotography to train people for how to inhabit the linear utopia of continuous modernism. The story therefore follows an array of buildings and projects and people, from the "social condensers" of the Soviet Union to the textile factory towns of utopian Robert Owen, from the industrialized reading machines of Bob Brown to the High Rise City designs of Ludwig Hilberseimer.
This narrative is presented in a single continuous line as long as the building itself -- one word per inch, 12,276 total -- using formats developed as part of the same movement and moment as Building 400. The viewer can experience it in time through a projection using rapid serial visual presentation, a technique which delivers words to a fixed point like frames of film in the gate of a projector, set the beat of a metronome; or they can explore it spatially, using a loupe to read microtype on the footprint of a single vast page. This exhibit is accompanied by a sheet of images which assembles the visual archive of the linear utopian era. Each poster is stamped with the symbol of this project, a seal which combines visual and literary references to finding the utopian heritage hidden in the barracks of Governors Island.
This narrative is presented in a single continuous line as long as the building itself -- one word per inch, 12,276 total -- using formats developed as part of the same movement and moment as Building 400. The viewer can experience it in time through a projection using rapid serial visual presentation, a technique which delivers words to a fixed point like frames of film in the gate of a projector, set the beat of a metronome; or they can explore it spatially, using a loupe to read microtype on the footprint of a single vast page. This exhibit is accompanied by a sheet of images which assembles the visual archive of the linear utopian era. Each poster is stamped with the symbol of this project, a seal which combines visual and literary references to finding the utopian heritage hidden in the barracks of Governors Island.
FINN BRUNTON ON HIS PROCESS AND EXPERIENCE AS A FELLOW:
“When I received this residency with the Institute for Public Architecture, I had never been to Governors Island and had only the vaguest idea of what I would do here. I have had a longtime interest in how humans use stories to navigate landscapes: the periploi of ancient Greece, for example -- directions for travel by water in the form of a story about the journey from the sailor's perspective -- or the songlines of Australia's aboriginal peoples; the land nam songs of Norse seafarers, Chinese geomancy for situating buildings and cities, following the movements of animals in Vedic India, and providing verbal directions to find a restaurant in urban Japan. My thought was to look for the stories which overlay this island in its complex history, and combine the time of narration with the space of walking the terrain. In the course of that exploration, I found Building 400, Liggett Hall, and my project.
The building is baffling, an inexplicable artifact fallen out of another timeline: it resembles nothing so much as a phalanstère, a 19th utopian building designed to house an entire self-contained community. It cuts the island in half: a habitable wall, a 1920s megastructure. As I dug into its history, I discovered that it was a unique American example of a movement playing out in New York City, in the Soviet Union, in the European avant-garde, and beyond, and I set out to write this story.
Thanks to my cohort of other resident Fellows, and the time and creative opportunities provided the IPA, I was able to explore new dimensions in my work, with site-specific text in formats beyond the article or the book. In conversations and crits with our group, the project took its final shape: a linear text as long as the building itself -- one word per inch -- delivered with experimental technologies of reading developed at the time that Building 400 was under construction, technologies which manifested the ethos of the building itself. I have fulfilled my original goal, to work with the spatiality and temporality of prose, in a way I never could have without the opportunity to be based on Governors Island with the freedom to explore as part of the remarkable community assembled by the IPA Residency.”
The building is baffling, an inexplicable artifact fallen out of another timeline: it resembles nothing so much as a phalanstère, a 19th utopian building designed to house an entire self-contained community. It cuts the island in half: a habitable wall, a 1920s megastructure. As I dug into its history, I discovered that it was a unique American example of a movement playing out in New York City, in the Soviet Union, in the European avant-garde, and beyond, and I set out to write this story.
Thanks to my cohort of other resident Fellows, and the time and creative opportunities provided the IPA, I was able to explore new dimensions in my work, with site-specific text in formats beyond the article or the book. In conversations and crits with our group, the project took its final shape: a linear text as long as the building itself -- one word per inch -- delivered with experimental technologies of reading developed at the time that Building 400 was under construction, technologies which manifested the ethos of the building itself. I have fulfilled my original goal, to work with the spatiality and temporality of prose, in a way I never could have without the opportunity to be based on Governors Island with the freedom to explore as part of the remarkable community assembled by the IPA Residency.”
COLLABORATORS/SUPPORT
Design of stamp and layout of magazine and poster by Summer ‘26 fellow Sara Dean.
People
