Course: First Year Studio 

Critic Brennan Buck

Fall 2012

 

Location: 862 Washington St. New York, USA

 

Program: Dance studio & recital hall.  A more private side of the building houses 3 daily use practice rooms & break areas for dancer training & rehearsal.  The public from the street level & the level of the Highline are invited in to access a cafe at any time.  A lobby, recital hall invite the more formal use of the building while the cafe doubles as a reception area for after the performance. 

 

Description: The site is located in a particularly voyeuristic neighborhood of New York City at a merger of high end shops, the Highline, & the infamous Standard Hotel.  However this voyeuristic looking is no longer a power structure like the panopticon once was.  Each participant in the space, local, tourist, dancer, shopper, flaneur or other, plays both the watcher & the watched.  The culture of the geographic location points to a post-paranoid society where access to personal information is no longer feared & all participate in capitalist stage.  Within this play is even the acknowledgment of inevitable public security cameras which coalesce a virtual & spatial memory of the city parallel to that of the collective folds of the subject’s participation.  The building is a manifestation of this contemporary phenomenon.  Instead of one subject objectifying another subject, each participant acts subjectively & objectively, thus fragmenting the panopticon.  Each tube represents one of the infinite multi-directional visual interactions with the site.  The interiors of the tubes are lined with lit & pixelated images of the exterior to create a continuity between what is near & what is beyond, like the exterior spaces warped through the building in every direction.