Channelbeta - projects - Park Avenue, ISS Interactive Screen Skyscraper

Tomorrow, life will be organized around carapaces, within introverted spaces. It will shelter in folds of the skin. While the ongoing withdrawal of the individuals of western societies is not likely to decrease, buildings will become more and more intelligent and interactive.

Park Avenue is designed as the scenery of a urban movie fiction. It is based on actual facts and connected to a fictional close future which finds its roots in our present days. This project is a extrapolation of the real which enables to test current typologies in possible environments. In other words, it is an attempt to explore the possibilities of programming disruptive buildings for man activities at the heart of the metropolis of the future that could altogether meet the demands for shelter and interactivity while opening rifts for the unfamiliar.

The action takes place in Park Avenue, New York city. At the heart of the urban mass, a 31 stories tower grows above the city drifting in cantilever upon the existing urban grid.

While the New York city grid predetermines the shape and boundaries of the tower, an atrium pierces from top to bottom the core of the rectangular frame. Shops develop around the vacuum created by the atrium; offices are placed along the facades near the light. The external façade is a massive translucent skin composed of thick transparent stones which react to electronic pulses sent out by the tower activity. With its digital display continuously updated, the internal façade serves as a support for commercial activities. These landscaped surfaces develop exchange and information areas between the building and the city life.

The free body of the atrium lives within its rectilinear structure. At some points, the skin loses its shape, cuts trough the external façade and opens up windows, creating unexpected and disruptive viewpoints on the city. The cuts in the walls are the release of a tension, allowing the buildings to breathe through punctures and to be cast by natural light transforming the hitherto cramped interior spaces into living spaces subject to light.

By breaking away from the verticality and geometry induced by the New-York grid, these spots, outgrowths of the skin, are more than simple windows. The tension between the two skins generated by their overlapping triggers a disturbance between inside and outside which become melted. The project tries to provide a secure environment for introverted individuals, and at the same time to make these same individuals aware of their imprisonment and retreat into alienating structures. While the building meets their needs and demands for protection by offering a reassuring home, the blurring of the limit between inside and outside embodies and foreshadows the existence of the unfamiliar.

The World Trade Centre attack demonstrated the fragility and vulnerability of tall buildings in their present configurations. Beyond the issue of determining whether it is still desirable to built such buildings according to the same design in the present geopolitical state of the world, what is also at stake is to determine the stance one should adopt towards those that are already built and will get older.

Tall buildings and the contested ideologies of progress and empowerment they embody could be reclaimed through a reconstitution of both the organization of their own space and of their relation from one to another.

In this view, Park Avenue could be thought of as the first part of a wider project of regeneration of the New-York city grid. By making its way through the city underground, the free body would spread at random through the city and emerge at some points. One can hence imagine the creation of a second level of organization of the city in which another set up would cross and overlap the grid leading to a new distribution of space. This project does not intend to dismantle the linear and rigid structure of the existing buildings and the grid. It tries to explore how the whole rectilinear urban set up of the city could be in a way renewed with a different identity.

Florent Rougemont

Florent Rougemont is architect and lives in Rotterdam. His activity explores different fields, architecture, design, planning and media.

He participated in several competitions, among them, the city, less aesthetics, more ethics for the 2000 Venice Biennale, Amphibious Living, Architecture Image and Emotions organised by Arca magazine and Gruppo Auchan Rinascente. He has recently entered an idea competition for the new city hall in Rotterdam. He also produces animations, like Living Architectures presented at the 5th international festival for architecture in video in Firenze.

He is currently working on a bicycle shelter at the ESAD Art's school in Strasbourg, a work in process due to completion end 2002