Précis

Rev. 11.9.06

I live in a city of undeniable complexity- a complexity that stems largely from the sheer density of its population. For most of the city, these conditions are the inevitable resultants of your typical metropolitan social conditions – poverty, crime, overpopulation, and, particularly in New York City, the ever-increasing price of land. Those who find they suffer living in the city under these conditions make it their goal to escape to the outlying suburbs. They cannot fully detach themselves from the city for career-related or personal reasons but live more comfortably knowing they’ll have their suburban retreat at the end of the day. At the other end of the spectrum are people who make it their life goal not to escape the city but to further immerse themselves in it. They find a need to place themselves at the crossroads of millions of other lives and events not just for convenience but because they’ve become accustomed to this close proximity to others. The notion of isolating oneself from city life becomes not a retreat but rather a punishment; prisons and boot camps choose to remove those unfit for society and chastise them as far from ‘normality’ as possible – far upstate, on islands, etc – in complete isolation from the rest of the world. In fact, the level of complexity and density in ones life has quickly become one of the criteria on which one’s social success is judged. If you’re not constantly multitasking with a blackberry in one hand and a cell phone in the other or if you don’t have a proposal to work through while you race through your lunch, you haven’t found success yet. I live in a city that feeds off this simultaneity of events. Or, to be more accurate, it devours them.

This notion of simultaneity is nothing new in the architectural world. Multifunction buildings have always served multiple uses in a collective space and the current iteration of the multifunction building generally houses office, retail, and dining spaces. It allows one to fall into the routine of working in the morning, shopping and eating at lunch, followed by working the rest of the day. The different programs are often layered one on top of the other with little interaction between them other than the flow of people moving between the spaces. This layering results more in a linear progression of events rather than simultaneity and allows one to traverse through each layer without ever experiencing the different programs on the way to the desired space. Furthermore, if one doesn’t happen to work in the building, the idea of having multiple functions within becomes mundane. A passerby needs to actively enter the building and when doing so most likely has only one such function as a destination in mind. All other spaces are ignored and never experienced in favor of that destination.

It, then, is my hope to re-explore the multifunction space in relation to the urban characteristics of the present day city. A space that facilitates this demand for simultaneity, density, and complexity and weaves itself into the urban fabric of New York City. True simultaneity requires a synaesthetic blurring of boundaries between each event or program, a blurring that creates a space and experience unique to each individual. For example what would happen if the design office, management office, and the retail store of a single entity such as the Gap converged in a single space? The interactions between customer, management, and design team would directly affect how each conducts its everyday operations. Management feels pressure from being exposed to its customers but at the same time is able to place more of an influence on its design team. The design team can see first hand the response actual customers have on their products and convey these findings directly to management, and so on. What would it be like to occupy the space between all three entities? To interrupt the tension between them and become the fourth element, even if just passing through for a brief moment.