BDES1020 <Tiffany Liew>

Abstract

As a broadcasting corporation’s headquarters, the office building explores issues of interference, filtering and transparency in New York’s transmission of media. With a friction between the wish to appear objective in its delivery of information and the subjective nature of representation, communication becomes central to its program. Towards the more public parts of the building legibility comes across in the form of a clearly-directed central circulation based on a core and an unusually open ground floor, but this clear movement is compromised by the direction that the building enforces to its occupants. Through its structure’s shifting geometry, notions of manipulation and ideas of ‘treated information’ arise, just as the building’s program changes from a more public domain to a secluded private space in the sky. The building’s multiple skins express how through selection of information, the media both exposes and conceals. Through drawing the juxtaposition between transparencies and materiality, the skins cover up parts of the building which house the private offices that form its central nervous system – a place where unfiltered and primary sources of information are conceived for processing and projection to the public. Symbolically the folds of the outer skin reinforce this idea of manipulation through hiding what’s underneath as well as projecting itself into the public area, where it breaks up sound and sight to filter what can be seen and heard inside. All-in-all, the building’s domineering presence questions the extent to which New York epitomises the liberty found in the city’s democratic structure, emphasising the need for a free public voice.