Advanced Studio V: Fall 1997 Instructor: Karen Bausman Studio Brief ZOO SITE Central Park Zoo Fifth Avenue at 64 th Street New York City PROGRAM To produce a fully realizable architectural alternative to the Central Park Zoo precinct as presently constructed. The Zoo will be both site and subject. BRIEF Zoos, such as the one in Central Park, New York City, came into existence at about the same time the industrialized world first started to experience the disappearance of animals from every day life. The zoo, where people now go to observe animals their ancestors previously saw while engaged in the daily habits and rituals of work and sport, today has become increasingly a very public display of artificiality. Due to land prices, increasing crowds, and even the lack of availability of some species now nearing extinction, artificial animal habitats have been reduced to even more minimal levels. Therefore, all instincts and normal actions are marginalized, for animals as well as spectator. The increase of people owning "virtual pets" is on the increase. PROCESS This studio will engage in three principal investigations of increasing specificity and scale in an effort to affect a re-alignment of borders, territories and habitation for animals and man within the Central Park Zoo, specifically. Photography and various computer software programs will be utilized. We will begin the semester with the micro scale and among other things, attempt to engineer a new "animal" species. Following that, and beginning with a photographic land-use survey of Central Park, we will define the habitat of the newly re-created "animal" and anticipate its territorial influence upon localized conditions of the existing zoo precinct. We will conclude the exercise and semester by designing morphological structures designed with the new "animal" in mind and via the engineering process, provide for expressive elements allowing for the architectural definition of enlarge territories within both the park and zoo. MEDIUM The following questions will guide the major operative processes within the studio and provide the conceptual underpinnings for the project as we seek, both on an individual and collective basis, the form and content of three simultaneously pursued investigations resulting in the design of a newly realized zoo. Question 01: Biology and photography are similar in that both are concerned with relaying information. Biology is the study of successive changes in genetic information and matter over time. Biotechnology allows for the investigation and manipulation of genetic material, sometimes resulting in the creation of a new species of animals. Photography is a traditional technique for cataloging information, realized only with the aid of a chemical process. Today that process of organizing information has, to a large degree, been digitized with the resulting images able to be manipulated with the use of sophisticated computer programs, including Photoshop and Illustrator. So, does "information" now mean the same when utilizing either discipline? Or, is the term metaphoric only when applied to these two processes that a re so distinctly different? Question 02: Biology and photography are similar in that both are concerned with relaying information. Biology is the study of successive change in genetic information and matter over time. Biotechnology allows for the investigation and manipulation of genetic material , sometimes resulting in the creation of a new species of animals. Photography is a traditional techniques for cataloging information, realized only with the aid of a chemical process. Today that process or organizing information has, to a large degree, been digitized with the resulting images able to be manipulated with the use of sophisticated computer programs, including Phototshop and illustrator. So, does "information" now mean the same when utilizing either discipline? Or, is the term metaphoric only when applied to these two processes that are so distinctly different? Question 03: Since man now has the ability to deliberately interfere and work toward desirable "natural" organic mutations and therefore can naturally select what he desires based on this ability and a geneticists model is "operative" in so far as it can be introduced organically and may even be useful as a means of advancing or enhancing agriculture or industrial achievement, what is the position then of an artist model? Is an artist's model less pragmatic than the geneticist's and therefore "purer" in the value-free discourse of science?