An 1847 photograph pictures the Brennan Farm, perched atop a crumbling cliff as 84th Street rends through the land. Edgar Allan Poe boarded here, living on the verge between two landscapes: the “island of many hills” and today’s gridded Island Metropolis. His two hour walk to work via Broadway wanders into the vacant shadow of One Times Square, paying her rent by flaunting million dollar ads. In 1908, her predecessor, the squat nine storey Pabst Hotel, is pictured during demolition. Modest structures vanish while makeshift ads are erected, heralding massive architectures of skin and sign to come — architectures of a “Naked City.” Both the assaulted farm and the gutted hotel are poised on the brink of two urban realities; they plumb the landscape’s indiscretions. How to clothe a naked city? How to fashion an architecture that fits a discrepant landscape? These are the questions posed by Poe’s farm and the Pabst.
In answer, an architecture emerges from the Pabst like a jacket from a squat wardrobe: a nine storey Laundry Hotel hanging within One Times Square. But, to make a jacket fit, one must take a good measure. The architecture unpacks across Broadway like a tool box, as nine stories unravel to create nine means of measuring discrepancy; nine tools refining the Hotel’s architectural language. Each architecture measures Manhattan’s topographic discrepancies, “giving utterance to” demographic discrepancies — between Starbucks and the coffee vendor trying to earn an honest buck. An essai immortalising Broadway’s misfits as discrepant peoples within a discrepant landscape.
Masters Project | Architectural Design | ESALA | 2018-2020
TUTORs: victoria clare bernie and adrian hawker
Street Vendors in Jule's Dassin's film "Naked City"
Plan of Broadway with final Nine Proposals for a Discrepant Landscape
Packing Broadway into the studio in Edinburgh
The real broadway, the fantasy of nine new proposals and the studio - all sitting in tandem.
The 1850 Viele Map of Broadway of Manhattan (inverted) with Broadway scheme in white.
Unravelling the city's poets across the city's hills - E.A Poe's "The Raven" as a poetic measure of discrepancy
Poe poetic meter becomes a structural measure which is repeated and re-iterated across Manhattan
Sections through the Avenues of Manhattan (1850) show a landscape of hills and discrepancies
Folded section through broadway, unfolded and comparing existing and historic topographies
The Lyric Theatre
A laundry tower in Timesd Square seeks to clothe a naked - i.e. a flattened - city
Ravelling and Unravelling the fabric of a Naked City
Olympia Concrete Hall
44th Street Glass, Plan
Topographic section used to develop series of plinths for the Studio Exhibition
The proposed exhibition uses a telescopic perspectival shift effect - from this angle, all the models appear at the same scale. From the other end, differences in scale are greatly exaggerated.
Architectures emerge out of Times Square
Raven Truss
An Architectural Urban Scheme projected off of a strange drawing table
A Strange Drawing table which allows the perspective of shadows and projections to be altered - precursor to the perspectival shift designed into the exhibition
Typical pose.
Shifting shadows.
Forms at devised from folds and shadows re-appear in the architecture of the schemes.
A screen on which to draw shadows.
Ghostly apparitions in the studio haunt the work.
Metropolitan opera House
Metropolitan Opera House
The Spoken Word Theatre
The Spoken Word Theatre and Vendors Galleries - Section
The Paramount Pipes Palace, et al.
