TIMES SQUARE DEVELOPMENT
New York, NY
Hyper-Times Square Varying degrees of information blanket your personal space as you make your way through the connoted walls of Times Square. Signs, symbols, images, light, street performers, crowd of tourists, sounds, and vehicles …. confront you. Coca-Cola, Calvin Klein, Disney, Sony, NASDAQ, ABC, MTV….manipulate you. These encounters imply an interactive experience, one that is similar to the virtual space of the Internet just without the individual control of the journey. Representing Times Square or any piece of it on a two-dimensional page whether as text or image creates an interesting dilemma. Redeveloping it as many have proposed in the past from its multiple vantage points with its simultaneous bombardment of image is even more fascinating. I was happy to have been given this opportunity to speak about such a place and not be constricted by the borders of the page. A presentation on the web allows for an interactive experience, one that replicates more precisely the space of hyper-information. Jacques Derrida argued in Of Grammatology that "the end of linear writing is indeed the end of the book . . .that is why, beginning to write without the line, one begins also to reread past writing according to a different organization of space". Hyper-textural language can be read non-sequentially, it is interactive and it is spatial. The layers of linking information in this spatial way can be limitless. Information becomes codified and experience guided. Times Square has been fabricated out of this layering of information making it a potential zone for hyper-information exchange in the new informational city. Architects of all discipline are now rendering their predictions toward the effect that the informational city will have at various scales in our lives. In the forefront of the discussion lies these question of what shape will future cities take: How will new methods of communicating brought on by the Digital Age reduce the "physical" size of our world? Will the idea of Bigger being better apply? How will we enlighten our conceptual understanding of exchange by means of electronic space to reach beyond that of mere goods and services? Will commercialization of goods change? We will go beyond the formal technical requirements into the implied spatial layering for architecture of tomorrow? "Will buildings like information be dematerialized transformed into glass twinkling dust or light projections or will be left behind safeguarding some brick and mortar notion of reality?" Will architecture remove itself as a proper reciprocal of real estate propositions and step forward to take responsibility for planning practices? In short the purpose of this is to elucidate Times Square and realize its potential as a zone for Global Information Exchange by rendering links that will enunciate discussion about these questions we are posing on broad issues which will effectually transform our cities in the near future. Linkages Real and Virtual Assembly Space Proximity, Context and Place Space of Flows - Organization vs. Codification Free Space Growth of Signs Hyper-Space - Compression of the Sign.
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