Museum of Exchange

Museum of Exchange

99 Bowery, New York, NY

Settled in within Chinatown the Museum of Exchange exploits the latent rituals within the Chinatown, specifically the studies of the nature of the honored tradition of wrapping the goods that are being exchanged and purchased in red, a symbol of luck.  This modern day translation of commodity, exemplified by the proliferation of the red bag and the color red represented the connection to a cultural and neighborhood identity that was innate in the prior object studies. The Museum of exchange also seeks to reveal the nature of commodity of the objects in both the marketplace and the museum share characteristics that the users may not be immediately aware of and other latent conditions by displacing and juxtapositioning the objects and spaces against one another, hopefully bringing these relationships to the forefront, such as the items on display as an object of art while the market speeds behind the other side of the wall.  The nature of the wall is the decodifier for these interactions and relationships to occur. At a local and global scale within the building, the wall reveals the inherent properties of the objects it contains, while contrasting them against one another. It also acts as a wayfinder through the space for the displaced user. The user in many ways becomes like the object, displaced and reoriented based on the weaving of the wall throughout the Museum.

Market Rituals within Chinatown

Performative Tasks of the Wall Between Programs

Market Exchange

Ritual Exchange

East West Section and Ground Floor Plan

North South Section and Second Floor Plan

Market Displacement within the Museum

Ritual Displacement within the Museum

Massing Model

Conceptual Massing Model

Conceptual Model of the Wall

Initial Studies Regarding Ritual-Object to Ritual

Initial Studies Regarding Ritual-Ritual to Object

Museum of Exchange-Abstract Studies

Initial Studies of  Taxonomy and Organization

Adjusting the Grid, Abstract Studies

Filling the Grid, Abstract Study

Taxonomizing Repetition

Public Art Lab

I am creating an art institution that creates a new relationship between the public and the artist.  There are many other institutions that exist within NYC, but not like this one.  For instance, Art in General is a non-profit organization that helps produce new work.  Creative time is dedicated to public art.  There are also museums like Moma and the New Museum that exhibit high art.  This institution pulls these ideas into one place and introduces the public in a whole new way.  The public is now made part of the process, and the building can be seen as a laboratory for testing and producing public art.  The building is a giant canvas filled with voids and surfaces where artists are invited to create and test their ideas.

The public program has been divided into three zones: the pay galleries, the free areas, and the artist/education workshops.  The pay galleries help support the institution financially and will hold curated shows.  The free areas serve as attracting points to draw the public through the building so they will encounter the art and can be used as test subjects in artistic experiments.  The artist zones serve to unite the different groups of people in collaboration around the artwork.

The public will be drawn into the building by pulling the public park onto the site from the Chrystie side.  Along the way, they would encounter labs and voids, both testing grounds for new art.  These lab zones serve as connecting elements between the free people, the pay people, and the artists, themselves.

Museum of Translation

The act of translation is a complex but necessary process that is inevitably tied to questions of authenticity and agenda.  The Museum of Translation explores these complexities between a continuously rotating pair of languages that illustrate diaspora narratives.  Through a play of angled solids and voids, the two sides of the museum are negotiated by “translators” that frame a variety of understandings of translation as the visitor travels both through and between languages.  The experience of the museum should provide critical spaces for consideration of types of translation so that the two sides, though distinct, start to overlap and exchange through these areas of translation.

Below are select images from the project.

 

Museum Mall of Galleries

This institution proposes to destroy the Lower East Side art district by absorbing all of the galleries in the surrounding area and forcing those out which don’t assimilate. Utilizing the warped waffle slab, The musuem creates a vocabulary of subversion whose internal logic challenges the authority of the Museum and the autonomy of the Gallery.

Museumus Propono Defero

Study of the Jewish Museum’s Man Ray Exhibit exploring the use of curation to manipulate identity.

Re-taxonomized Man Ray Exhibit exploring the use of a single space to create multiple narratives.

Path Diagram through the museum.

East-West Section

The project forms a museum space that forces the creation of multiple overlapping narratives.  Central to this aim is a critique of the Museum of the Diasporic Community’s role as a displacing agent.  Therefore the museum is organized around a false dichotomy between the preservation of local community and the acceptance of diasporic community and through promoting slippage between the two sides, parallels and differences are exposed.  These moments of slippage as well as moments of forced juxtaposition allow for the choice of path through the museum to understanding.

Museumus Luminarium

The “Luminarium” project is an attempt to juxtapose the inherent qualities of light (both natural and artificial) as a way to re-contextualize the special elements of a museum.  Lighting is an intrinsic element of all buildings, yet is often negated as an architectural feature, even though the implementation of lighting can both generate and augment the atmospheric conditions of a space.  For example, work spaces require a cold, high contrast light, while large multi-use spaces require much warmer, brighter, low contrast lighting.  When separated, these lighting variations may go completely unnoticed.  But, by highlighting this juxtaposition, a new contextualization of programmatic function and connotation becomes apparent.

However, merely placing two different lights next to one another does not generate the type of juxtaposition necessary to generate any real spacial differentiation.  This is because there is a difference between a hard architectural boundary (such as a wall) and a soft atmospheric boundary (such as light spilling out of a doorway).  It is therefor necessary to create an element upon which this atmospheric condition may be registered in contrast to the hard architectural boundary.

[Img. 1-3 | Studies of the relationships between hard architectural boundaries and soft atmospheric boundaries]

[Img. 4 | Study of atmospheric properties within a Chinatown Facade]

[Img. 5 | Taxonomic classification of all programs within the museum by their inherent lightning characteristics]

[Img. 6-7 | Renderings of Bowery and Chrystie Facade’s]

[Img. 8-9 | Interior renderings of the Bowery lobby and the Digital Media Gallery]

[Img. 10 | Exploded Isometric of major building components]

[Img. 11| Diagrammatic representation of augmented lighting conditions]

[Img. 12 | Exploded Isometric of the “Atmospheric Wall’s” structural system]

[Img. 13 | Longitudinal building section]

Post Still in Progress…

Centrum Pro Bulla Spacium Et Intervallum: the center for distance studies

 

                The Center for Distance Studies seeks to explore conditions of diaspora and displacement through materials that highlight relationships of distance. Because diaspora always involves some form of displacement, it is inherently intertwined with a condition of distance. In many cases, the materials explored at the center are cartographic- both contemporary and historical- but the center also highlights works that do not take the form of traditional maps. Many of the galleries occur along ramps throughout the building and double as routes of circulation. As one moves through these gallery spaces, one also becomes aware of proceeding along a path and traversing through space. There are also more traditional gallery spaces located off of the main circulation/gallery route. Additionally, the center includes a library for the archiving of cartographic material, an artists’ space, where artists exploring themes relating to distance would be invited for residencies and a workshop area, where the public is able to come to learn new mapmaking techniques, including GIS. The building takes the form of a torque, opening up new paths through the block from the Bowery to Chrystie Street where the building pulls away from the neighboring parti-walls. Structurally, the building is braced by a series of steel ribs that move through the torque, gradually rotating to reveal its form. Through its gallery spaces, research initiatives and educational programming, the Center for Distance Studies seeks to engage local residents, visitors to New York and specialists with its diverse and unique programming.
-Jocelyn

Centrum Pro Bulla Spacium Et Intervallum: abstract models

These are some abstract models from early on in the semester. The first provided a way to explore how multiple long paths could pass by and intersect each other within a confined space. While the long path working its way through a building remained within my project, this model did not directly translate into anything further. The second abstract model was meant to be an investigation of the torqued form within the scaled site dimensions. The wooden frame was intended only to be an armature for the paper and string torque, but instead, when I tried to tighten up the strings, I ended up twisting the entire model, which was an unexpected result.

Urban Media Analysis

The Museum of Diasporic Media uses media as a real time method of tracking, strengthening and curating diasporic clustering and dispersal.  Through mapping New York City’s ethnic neighborhood densities in relation to a news bodega near the museum site in the Lower East Side, clusterings of urban ethnic neighborhoods are evident.  In mapping where the ads in these newspapers geographically direct the reader in the city, one can see that there is a re-clustering of ethnicities that diversifies the neighborhoods.  A closer analysis of the structure and time duration of different media types shows that people’s systematic relationship to the media functions on a range of scales of duration.