TIMES SQUARE DEVELOPMENT
New York, NY
Real and Virtual Assembly Space "Marshall McLuhan, author of War and Peace in the Global Village, suggested in 1964 that "today, after more than a century of electric technology, we have extended our central nervous system itself in a global embrace, abolishing both space and time as far as our planet is concerned". McLuhan was speaking of the changes brought about by media such as television, but his argument applies equally well if not more suitably to Virtual Space and the Internet. As the exchange of information becomes commodity the Assembly Space of the urban center will be transformed into Media Center. The world stage is being constructed and through use of the video screen, the new media apparatus, connected to the Internet, the urban center will become the portal to the 'Global Information Exchange'. This exchange is a virtual space where global communities will assemble locally, informationally. In the early 1990's President Clinton along with the media unknowingly demonstrated the disconnect between "real" and "virtual" assembly with their choreographed electric town hall meetings. The idea of the virtual meeting place is denotative of the democratic ideal however; "can we say that 10 million people watching the President have in any meaningful way, met? It is a question with deep implications for Architecture"(1). Can architecture make real the virtual spaces of the digitized world? (1) Sorkin, Michael. "Meeting Places". Progressive Architecture 4/1993 p.106-7
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