Project Introduction
In the fall semester of the New York/Paris program students created a dense emergent surface, a matrix of 16 panels that informed a final design proposal.
The semester began with a one week design problem-creating a path linking Central Park's two great museums, The American Museum of Natural History and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and a pavilion housing an artifact of interest to both: Olmstead's Greensward competition entry drawing. At the end of the semester students revisited and transformed this path and pavilion, re-programming it to house a café / bodega.
Intervening between these two design projects was the bulk of the students work, a matrix of panels. Each panel represented one of 12 one-week analysis and design projects. These projects, a tactical survey of drawing and demonstrating, manufacturing and mapping, hopscotch back and forth between two cities - an actual site in New York and a virtual site in Paris - and ascend and descend along a scale of six different operational dimensions: clothes, chair, room, building, street, and city.
New York assignments started big and grew small; Paris assignments started small and grew big. At the room-scaled, mid-point of the sequence, Room/Paris and Room/New York, the matrix project became recursive and self-referential. Each analysis/design project became sited in an earlier project, in the same city at the opposite scale. Therefore, the project emerged as one of sampling and re-mixing, sequencing and re-sequencing, figuration and reconfiguration, all at intimate and urban scales.
A wide range of material practices and representational techniques, from metal-forging to orthographic manipulation, were deployed. Inspired by Perec, Cortezar, Calvino, and other literary practitioners of misdirection, we aimed for intensities, densities, and the shapes of two cities.
