Light Pavilion at Times Square
– A Vertical Public Space
Susanne Joys
www.sjoys.com
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The project is about light and space in New York City.
Times Square is a stressful place filled with tourists and New Yorkers going to work. It is illuminated all day and night by natural and artificial light. Most people are amazed by the bright lights, but most people also find Times Square too intense, because of the noise, the traffic and the amount of people. What if you where there without the noise, without the traffic, without the crowds of tourists, without the stressed people, and could just experience the colorful light?
The project is an urban space which you can enter to get away from the hectic city. The site is the little left over Island between Broadway and 7th Avenue. The project is about the opposite, which evolved from the idea of using the light that was already there and not having any light sources of its own. That idea is the opposite of what Times Square is about. Instead of adding a volume to Times Square, a volume is removed. Most buildings in New York are volumes extruded from the city grid, and the project is therefore a void, the footprint of the city grid extruded the other way. The project is about the negative instead of the positive.
The projects function was about experiencing light. Architecture can be regarded as optics and space instead of a spatial structure. Times Square is a brightly lit open, vertical space. The opposite would be a dark enclosed box, a camera obscura. When a small ray of light is led into the completely dark box, which could be of any size, an image of the outside world is projected on the opposite world, upside down and mirrored. This is what happens inside a camera, and a film/digital sensor “writes down” the image over a short period of time. If the aperture is always open, the image will always be there as a live movie of the outside world. It is a simple natural phenomenon.
Times Square is one of the most visited and photographed places in the world, so a massive camera obscura is relevant to the place. The world is very technical and complex, which makes it difficult to understand, and doing the opposite, the project goes back to basic optics. It is important to show people of the modern world that light and its behavior is amazing. It educates or reminds people of a natural phenomenon in a place where nature seems to be forgotten. It was therefore very important during the process to make the design as simple as possible, so it would be clear that it was a simple beam of light that projected the live image, and not a computer, cables and a projector.
By using mirrors and a series of lenses, the light is “transported” down the void, and projected onto the walls of the void. An angled mirror is placed right behind the pinhole to reflect the light downwards. A convex lens gathers the rays of light into a point (known as the focal point), and by placing another convex lens at the same distance form the focal point as the first lens, the image is “transported” down a certain distance. To “transport” it further, another convex lens have to be placed at the same distance from the focal point, until the wanted distance is reached. Then, another mirror projects the image on the wall. The size of the projected image is decided on the distance from the last mirror to the wall.
Several pinholes are used to create a collage effect of an architectural space. If we take one picture with a camera, it looks like we are observing the world through a window, and the perspective only seems correct from one angle. If we take several pictures and put them together like a collage, the perspective is not correct, but it makes us feel like we are more inside the picture. Instead of projecting one 2d image of Times Square, like you where watching it from the outside, several pinholes are used to create a space set of views, a representation of Times Square which still makes you feel that you are in Times Square, and not observing it from the outside.
Above ground, the plaza is a landscape of rectangular fragments made of concrete, as if the concrete pavement was extruded. They have to be extruded above ground, because they contain the pinhole cameras and the mirror.
They are volumes of different heights. They create an urban landscape, where people can sit down, take pictures and climb to get a better view of the hectic Times Square. Some squares are extruded above ground to become cameras, while some cameras are extruded below ground. They create the two ramps that go underground.
The project is about verticality. A camera obscura is almost completely dark, and there is therefore one simple circulation route, which leads people into darkness and out again. The two ramps have glass handrails and start at each side of the site, and they go parallel down the void. To get used to the darkness, you have to walk almost an entire round in a tunnel. You have the light from the entrance behind you, and slowly you are adapting to the light in front of you, which comes from the void underneath. Suddenly, the tunnel ends, and you are in at the top of the vast void. The ramp continues down the void. After a two rounds, the glass handrail turns into a bridge. The glass bridge becomes a lens of its own, because when the sun is parallel to the street grid, a camera pointed in that direction, the sun will hit the bridge and it will be lit. You cross the void, to the other ramp. You walk two rounds up again, into a dark tunnel again, so you get used to the light again. The tunnel also prevents light coming into the void that has not been let inside by the pinholes.
The void is casted at site in white concrete. Like a quarry, the void is a vertical landscape in one material, the ceiling, the walls and the ramp down and small alcove benches. To break the horizontal lines the ramp, there are subtle depth differences in the walls. They also enhance the fact that light does not exist until it hits a surface, whether this surface is perpendicular to the light beam or not. A static 3d surface can appear to change in depth and be very dynamic depending on the direction of light. The movement of light from above ground and the interaction of people underground makes this fact even clearer to the observer. To get the wanted depth and horizontality of the void, the walls are tilted less than 7 degrees and the ramp goes into the wall at to the south and the north.
The lenses transmit light, but a small amount of the light is also emitted, and the lenses will create a lit forest of glass and wires. There are 28 projecting lenses, just like there are 28 camera boxes above ground. Each camera has a specific view at all times and projects at the wall of the void the live movements of light from that place the camera aperture is pointed at.
The lenses and mirrors project light into the void. The moving world above is projected as an image at the opposite wall below. When its day and bright sunlight, the bottom of the void is almost possible to see, while at night, it appears as a black hole. One film might at one point show a passing car with high speed, while another can have a much slower movement which makes the film appear as a still photography.
It is an underground world to explore, a dark and mysterious world, with a forest of lit glass and moving light of different colors, a new way of experiencing the moving colorful lights of Times Square.
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retreat
sap 03.11.2008
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