Tactile Spectrum

_______________Highway 59 Houston, Texas 2005

Design Team: David Newton + Judson Moore + Sky Lanigan

Concept

Think of the contemporary freeway system as a material system, conducting material, social, economic, and informational flows along its bifurcating corridors. Consider this system in terms of how it self-organizes, just as sand poses itself in a dune field under the lines of force exerted by desert thermals. Consider specifically one of these self-organized states, the crystallization of a traffic jam. For too long as designers, as architects, as urban planners, as infrastructural designers we have ignored, passed-over, labeled as error, and tried to futilely fight this emergent property of the freeway system. This quagmire between the top-down myopia of current planning strategies and the bottom-up emergent logics of the material freeway system requires designers to take on a new ethics of design, a new material ethics, where designers allow emergent material logics to inform their thinking, design process, and conceptualization of problems. This stated feedback requires a deep sympathy with such emergent logics, a sympathy that will inevitably change our thinking as designers and generate evermore novel and subtly interpenetrating connections between worlds. This project attempts such a practice by taking the traffic jam as its object and seeking to investigate the social logics/relations/diagrams this phenomena projects into our world and how we might let those emergent logics inform and generate new models of programmatic organization and new theories of form within the freeway field. The examination is two tiered: how might these implicit diagrams be materialized and mapped? And how might we operate on those diagrams towards new programmatic ends?

In order to find a way of working with the infrastructure of the freeway system in a way that engages contemporary reality, we must be willing to develop a realistic and holistic approach to its operation. The assumed program of the freeway is still and only that of speed, the cold-war rhetoric of rapid mass-mobility, which the metropolitan freeway has ceased to embody long ago. Worse than that, we still view this fictitious speed program as program alone, outside of time, outside of place. The reality that the extreme condition of Houston forces us to consider takes up these issues. Program: the freeway is not just about rapid transit anymore. Time: we spend more time in our cars than anywhere else outside of work and home. Place: the freeway complex occupies one-eighth of the Houston metropolitan area.

The typical reformer’s approach to this situation is to find ways to “get the freeways moving again.” This rhetoric is myopic and antiquated. Studies show that congestion persists in spite of our continual efforts to widen highways and create new ones. In the auto-based city, the traffic jam is a permanent condition. What if freeway paralysis is viewed not as an aberration from the working system, but as an integral element of that system? We could even say that within the urban freeway complex, rapid transit is the off-hour byproduct of rush-hour congestion.

Our challenge denaturalizes the traditional conception of a network system as point-nodes connected by vector-links. The regularity of the traffic jam and the development of the feeder roads as consumer strip centers allows us to see the vector-based freeway complex as destination, with address and hours of operation. Now the streets themselves are linear nodes, with their on/off ramps serving as linking connectivity. Our proposal takes this self-consciousness of freeway existence two steps further. We don’t need to breathe life into the freeway complex, we want to bring out the lives we already lead there.

The emergence of mobile wireless networking is already incubating new ways to exploit the contained energy of the traffic-jam. Seizing the 59 trench extension in downtown Houston as a timely opportunity, our project reconstructs the freeway infrastructure to engage and operate upon the social-political-economic diagrams implicit in the traffic jam and its emerging context within the proliferating electromagnetic landscape of the city. Our intervention will primarily address three significant technology platforms: top-down mobile internet with location-aware G.P.S. positioning; bottom-up Bluetooth-based local area networks; and passive RFID tags. Our scheme tracks these software/hardware packages as they are projectively deployed amidst the human particle field of the freeway traffic jam, in order to observe and manipulate their capacity to incite new social, commercial, and formal realities.

Our attack redefines this infrastructural thread as a place of cultural exchange a contemporary Agora-which frees the freeway from rhetoric of rapid mass mobility. Through techniques of conceptual, operational, and physical de-lamination and re-lamination, we pull the strands of the cold-war mentality apart and re-weave them with the strands of the new city-the electromagnetic city. By forcing reinforced concrete to open up to interaction with the ever- thickening landscape of radio waves and digital communication, our pointed intervention sketches critical negotiations required of a twenty-first century infrastructure. The materialization of the multi-use radio spectrum meets the fraying of the monumental concrete slab to develop new ecosystems for our mutating cyborg sociality.

Informatic Lacunas

_______________Bryant Park – New York, New York 2006

Design Team: David Newton

Concept

This project is fundamentally concerned with two issues: 1. Producing an adaptable architecture that can serve the
dynamic office culture of the Times in its production of news; 2developing and exploring a notion of public space produced within this context of architectural adaptation. Let me first address adaptation in the project. Adaptation was an important dynamic that came up in my reading of New York City where I observed that the skyscrapers exhibited an interesting logic, a logic in which the exteriors remain in a static pose while masking an interior dynamism in the form of interior renovation and reconfiguration. I then wondered what the benefits would be if this logic were to be turned inside out and to conceive of a building system that externalizes this adaptation and change and loosely fixes itself to the cities surfaces which are read as immutable and static. Along with this reading I also observed that an adaptable architectural system could best facilitate the dynamic nature of news production by the times. So adaptation was a key concept to read and respond to the city as well as to the program at hand. This logic of taking a particular dynamic in the city and then turning it inside out so to speak, also came into play in my development of public space in the project, which can be explained best in the following way. It has been said that the most relevant architectural contribution to democracy and public space is the streets themselves, because anytime there is need to exorcise one’s first amendment rights the populace takes to the streets. This project attempts to internalize some of the logics of the street. And to begin to blur the distinction within the project between path and static place.

In order to materialize these inverted city logics, I developed a component system I call Linear Nodes. The concept of a linear node comes from an earlier project I developed, Tactile Spectrum, which sought to see major streets as destinations in themselves (linear nodes) and the intersections between those major streets as the links. So place is destabilized and pulled apart from a discrete point into a linear continuum. The linear node component blurs path and place as it unfolds spatial propositions through its material logics to meet different scales of activity producing shifting connective networks and emergent paths. The Linear Node can be installed or proliferated singularly or in complex networked ensembles that can perform at architectural or inter-urban scales. Integrated into this system is a media screen layer that registers GPS tags and emergent Local Area Networks created by the Bluetooth Technology, registering on the surfaces of the building and coordinating work groups in the NY times office culture and public conglomerations of various types as well. The surface also mediates and defines various emergent private and public lacunas by operating on its transparency, so for example becoming opaque to somebody walking by at an angle, but visible to someone standing perpendicular to the glass. The world projected by this building/interface is that of multiplicious transparencies and unfolding informatic lacunas where path and place are problematized and suspended in a state of ambivalent and productive tension.