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.