TIMES SQUARE DEVELOPMENT
New York, NY
Growth of the Sign Times Square connects all aspects of communication in one space - the metaphoric "Gross Roads of the World". Here the act of communicating goes far beyond the written or spoken world. The square with its publishing houses, theaters and then cinemas attracted many to a stage whose curtain of sign/signboard/billboards entertained, informed, and influenced the evolution of culture. The transformation of this space over time has created one of the most recognizable symbols for societal exchange in the world. Times Square represents communication as a by part of culture, and presently promotes the possibility for expanded global communication manifest within the urban fabric. It is a place "where the video screen becomes both window and doorway."(1) Before there were buildings in Times Square there were signs and these signs' messages have GROWN The signlsignboardlbillboard advertising is a language of images. It is the action of visually calling something to the attention of the public, especially by paid announcements. "If the language of images, which acknowledges no boundaries, needed translation, if it possessed the complexity and potential flexibility to give things a name - a characteristics of natural languages - the problem of intemationaiization and globialization would be solved. However, as we all know, images are read according to blocks of meaning and are recognized by means of analogical mechanisms; and these prerogatives lay down the objective limitations of visual communications and its instrumental exploitation in the production of (generalized) thought." Therefore, images that are able to be "decoded" (reread) by people in all industrialized geographical areas are those images that are anti-analogical interpretive. "The widespread possibility of anti-analogical interpretation will gradually produce a kind of cultural homologation on both an international and global level. The process of homologation has received considerable impetus from the technological images." "Technological images have become the real social experimenters on the basis of this new common language. The possibility for simultaneous broadcast as a means of visual communication is only one of the outcomes, (which has yet to be fully utilized interactively in Times Square or anywhere around the world). Visual information technology has been affected by means of what we could term an individual rapport between source and receiver (allowing for a private event to become more public and part of the urban fabric). According to the ideas of globalization or internationalization to whom you are advertising to, from where you the advertiser is coming from, is not top priority. Even what you are advertising is generalized to allow for this process of cultural homologation. The idea of simultaneity affords this. It gives the advertiser a home base as an international connector. One of the first examples toward a kind of cultural homologation occurred in Times Square when Sony located their jumbotron on the Times Tower. It allowed for the possibility of simultaneous broadcasting on an international and global level. The jumbotron is an inconspicuous advertisement for Sony. It presently acts as a displayer of many different kinds of live and prerecorded information, from political and social issues that transcend racial differences, native cultural issues, political ideologies, to traffic, weather reports, and pure entertainment events. It also calls to the public attention the desirable quality of Sony's capabilities in their industry of electronics so as to arouse a desire not only to buy its products but to also participate in its investments. Sony's jumbotron almost advertises without advertising. (1) Sorkin, Michael. "Meeting Places". Progressive Architecture 4/1993 p. 1 06-7
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