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My fourth year at Cooper Union, I decided to take a serious look at an urban project, Lincoln Center, a performing arts hub on the upper west side. The site is a precinct of three combined blocks. The main plaza is raised five feet off of street level towards the east side, even more so on the west. Underneath this platform is the underground maze of services for Lincoln Center.

In the city, there is no earth to walk on or solid ground. The streets themselves are deep cavernous vaults, buttressed up for conduit and piping to lace through. At Lincoln center, it seems that there is a campus of several buildings. However, below grade they are one. From beneath the casual glance, the theaters of Lincoln center puncture through what is perceived as solid ground, and then their auditoriums and stages are enclosed with one decorated box or another. This box rests on the tri-block platform – hovering over the free plan building below grade.

An investigation of structure: take an object and let it puncture through a floor plate made up of a grid of beams. In designing the floor plate structure around the object, all of the beams cut by the object are now useless, gone. An object inside of a rectangular hole remains. This is how I imagine the theaters, only they have walls rising from around the hole to make them look like box buildings.

My proposal for Lincoln Center was to transform the southwest corner (currently used as rentable space) as an experimentation ground for the furthering of the ideas and syntax I developed considering the site, particularly the abutting buildings. I was also looking at Walter de Maria, a minimal artist, as a way to look at the site.

An amazing piece named The Broken Kilometer is installed in SoHo at West Broadway. It is made up of 5 rows of 100 two-meter long brass rods. Spaced incrementally back so that each shining rod is visible, the room collects in one place what the mind and eye can not otherwise grasp – a kilometer. Broken, the mind must reconstruct what this kilometer could mean, whichever way the mind wills itself to go. The room begins to expand outward from each of the four sides of the room; kilometers reaching out in a new grid. Curling space up towards the viewer, there is something approaching an idea of the infinite in that glowing room.

The grid of the city also implies no end or limitation. I stood next to the Metropolitan Opera house gazing a the sunsets reflection on the vertically screened wall and wondered if it couldn’t rhythmically beat across the island of Manhattan in that thin elegant, glowing way of The Broken Kilometer. A structural grid of my own, I pulled the lines of the wall of the opera and the state theater down into the platform of the site and bared them as a pure skeleton. Let the people see – this city has no ground; we float. All of our connections to the earth are synthetic in this city. Bridges above and below enunciate the thoroughfare of the street and the volatile quality of the stage. These elements bring the inhabitant towards small towers that act as lenses through the punctured structural platform now covering the site.



 
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