DESA1002 'Continuous City' Veronica Dowling

Abstract

Project Explaination – New York City Theatre. Over the course of 2nd semester I have devoted my time to designing a Theatre and gallery in the city of New York. As a busy, bustling and work orientated city, New Yorkers are hereby offered a sophisicated new entertainment venue, in which they can play, relax and enjoy time away from their work environment. The building is located in the heart of New York City, a site presently occupied by the Rockafeller Centre, in an area dominated by tall, boxey high-rise buildings; the theatre’s organic shape standing out amongst these. The site overshadows a large public space intersected by the land axis, thus the building has the space to buldge into this public realm, an explosion of arts and culture, the front steps inviting the public into this cultural hub to visit either the theatre, gallery & display space, or the bar and function area. The public are further involved in the site through the ability to project films or theatre on the exterior facade of the building, able to be viewed on the buldge of the building from the park below. The buldging form the building takes expresses the way in which it holds so much cultural interest, appearing to explode out of its structural shell, peeling and buldging from a strict concrete box, into curved and stretched fabric bulbs and finally shattered triangles, creeping their way cancerously up the facade of the building to form the ‘glass-house’ like ceiling of the gallery space. This warping of the exterior form of the building out of the stereotypical box-like New York form is predominantly a result of the change of program on the interior of the building. At night the site poses as an equally impressive spectical, a glowing bulb is seen from the park beneath as the interior lights illuminate the fabric portion of the building and clearly articulate the silouette of the triangular pattern.