TIMES SQUARE DEVELOPMENT
New York, NY
Compression of Signs / Hyper-Space What do the spatial compression of signs offer collectively? "On television, commercial messages are separated by segmented programming and can get zapped by the remote control button. Along the highway, they occur in a linear sequence that recedes swiftly from view. In Times Square, on the other hand-whether experienced on foot or from a slow moving car or bus-spatial compression makes the messages almost simultaneous. In the kaleidoscopic barrage of imagery, the identity of the message's sender, still less the message, ceases to signify. Ultimately, the messages deplete each other's meaning, canceling each other out. As a system of hyper signification, Times Square becomes an ecstatic display of cacophonic and mutually negating communication vectors. Only the code itself-festive metalanguage of late capitalist hegemony-remains operative."(1) In "The Growth of the Sign", the emphasis was that in order for products to reach broader markets, the multi-cultural markets, advertisers have to deal with cultural differences by searching to create new signs, void of associations, not only for the products base company but also for the products message; and inessence derive a new language of signs or a new multi-cultural culture. In the "Compression of Signs", Joan Ockman's observations derive from the same principals as in "The Growth of the Sign" only to add what happens when - "the identity of all the message's sender"(s) -i.e. a sender like Sony, "still less the message" - advertises without advertising and ceases to signify? The example of Sony's initial means of visual communication through simultaneous broadcast can only grow into a codified and guided experience, similar to the interactive experience of the Internet -what we are calling a kind of Hyper-Space of global information exchange. The time/space sequence of these messages will constantly reinvent themselves, therefore calling for new flexible spatial relationships. At the scale of the square, Joan Ockman declares "The Babel of signification, which ends up producing one giant signifier: Times Square, the Place."(1) The transformation of this place from the publishing center, into theater, into cinema, into "Sin City", into media circus, into hyper capitalism, and finally into the capitol of global information exchange explains its cultural significance. These transformations took hold in broad steps, but unlike most transitional zones in cities where places became programmed about a singularity, Times Square throughout its history and transformations, has retained elements of each transcending program. It is this overlapping stimuli, which has made Times Square a place of over signification and hyper-reality. Joan Ockman declares there are two scenarios of development taking place. "One is what might be called the late-modern, left-intellectual, tragic scenario. In this reading, the crisis of signification engendered by the hyper-reality of the commercial messages, the crisis of authenticity provoked by the decontexturalization of historical meaning and the patronizing mythography of Main Street, and the crisis of public culture provoked by puerile entertainment values and puritanical sexual ones will inevitably lead to boredom, cynicism, and even belligerence."(1) The significance of place is rooted in history and negation of this paradigm can disrupt the value of a given place. The second scenario of development "takes the collapse of meaning engendered by Times Square's frenzied carnival of excess communication, the radical shock of the shift from sin to sign - a shock perhaps as great as anything the avant-garde ever devised; Disney! Times Square!! - as potentially liberating"(1) The mesmerizing stimuli created by the overt consumerist spectacle overwhelms the possibility of sanitation. The hyper-information inundates the senses to the degree that the resultant hypnotic gaze induces sensual indulgence. "Obscenity begins when there is no more spectacle, no more stage, no more theater, no more illusions, when everything becomes immediately transparent, visible, exposed in the raw and inexorable light of information and communication. We no longer partake of the drama of alienation, but are in the ecstasy of communication."(2) The plans for Times Square that are taking hold today are partly representatives of New York's practice of Real Estate markets dictating Architecture. The New 42nd Street Development, headed by Robert Stern, describes "the current plan as being the first in history that took a mandate legislative on vulgarity." And "when Disney came in because Stern brought in Eisner to see the deteriorating Amsterdam Theater, people began seeing the departure of past "vulgarities" and a new pure family entertainment-base plan." An attempt of a kind of "decontexturalization", as suggested in this first scenario. In reality both scenarios existed at some point, at some level, but it was never all Disney as the second scenario suggests. "Disney is but one in a group of media giants that have settles here. Besides Conde Nast, publishers of the New Yorker, Vogue, Vanity Fair and other glamorous tittles, the group includes Reuters, Bertelsmann, Billboard Publications and MTV, have settled here with Viacom, whose presence has history. Times Square has always connected all aspects of communication as a by part of culture and today with the large number of media giants that have, the process of cultural homologation can evolve. Whether intentional or unintentional we have already seen Times Square extend its media presence along Broadway with Time Warner/AOL taking Columbus Circle. Rebecca Robertson who directed the 42nd Street Development Projects through the years, reminds us " that at any time when the market hit, that (current plan) would have been the plan that got built." The major proposals of 1982 for 42nd Street requested developers to invest in a huge merchandise mart, one of, which was designed with a rather massive tower by KPF Architects. Another proposal of the same period, most recognized was that of Philip Johnson and John Burgee which designed for classical corporate identified towers around the Four Corners of Times Tower, negating signage as element of the structures. "This current plan is surely preferable to the hulking quartet of nearly identical corporate towers originally planned. Unless it's not. For despite the great differences in the architecture, signage and market niche, the new Time Square is now fused with a sense of sameness of homogenized spectacle", the second scenario." In terms of the architecture that exists now they are good examples of adapting to a system of commercial building. The buildings are a layering of armatures for commercial signs, lets hope the sign messages grow. (1) Ockman, Joan. "From Sin City to Sign City" A+U May 1999 p. 6-10 (2) Baudrillard, Jean. The Ecstasy of Communication, Semiotext, NY, NY 1987. p.21
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