TIMES SQUARE DEVELOPMENT
New York, NY
Space of Flows - Organization vs. Information "No architect has ever designed a bank, or a university, for that matter. They have designed only the physical shell that houses them. Banks and universities have an informational structure and content more marvelous by far than any architect can depict or has yet needed to."(1) The informational structure Michael Benedikt speaks of is a space of information. This new spatial paradigm for architecture will be made from a “Space of Flows”. The spatial patterns determined by informational processing activity will result in spaces characterized as a network whereby planning will be determined by information flows. Interaction between spaces will be made in response to these flows of information rather than in organizational schemes. Reconfiguration and modification will be the dominant strategies for the planning of space. The process is now interactive and the flows multidirectional. In this informational mode of planning and development a flexible, pervasive, integrated and reflexive spatial order rather than additive evolution will prevail. Informational systems transform the city into scaffold where “Places” become “Flows”. Manuel Castells author of The Informational City and The Rise of the Network Society writes of how information processes will reorganize space and time in the network society. "The new spatial order is a "space of flows" quite different from the "space of places" to which we have been accustomed. People still cluster in specific locales, but these clusterings take their shape from their involvement in global networks. Consider the City of London. The City has been in roughly the same area for many years. It would seem there is a simple continuity from the 19th century to the present day. For Castells, however, this is not so. The changing physical structure of the City over recent years, with its dazzling variety of unorthodox architectural creations, is now dominated by its position in global electronic money markets. London, New York and Tokyo form a financial trading network, carrying on an endless series of transactions. Physical proximity and highly concentrated transactions remain important and even acquire increasing significance - but they have their origin in globalized information flows. They are no longer "places", where "place" is defined as a locale, the form and meaning of which are contained within its boundaries."(2) As the city is a node of the global network, gathering places of the city are nodes of the network. Within these nodes are "parcels or packets" of informational spaces. Historically the City Square was a broadcast mechanism where information flows spread between people. Today these same spaces have become filled with manipulative mechanisms as discussed in Growth of the Sign, which are not broadcast mechanisms but advertising mechanisms. These mechanisms resolve a cultural homologation but not an informational one. For example in Times Square the parcels of information, i.e. the sign/signboard/billboard, are informational but the spaces between are not. To make the square informational is to amend the space between that space which may be considered as the "flow". To control this "flow" is to interpret the space as a compression of signs. (1) Benedkt, Michael, 1993, Cityspace, Cyberspace, and The Spaciology of Information. (2) Anthony Giddens reviews Manuel Castells The Rise of the Network Society in "The Times Higher", December 13, 1996
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