[Fwd: NYTimes.com Article: An Avant-Garde Design For a New-Media Center]

[Diana McCarty]

An Avant-Garde Design For a New-Media Center
March 21, 2002 
NY Times

By JULIE V. IOVINE


 

While the 1990's may come to be known as a decade in love
with eye-popping, crowd-attracting design, the new century
is in search of a fresh building type, architecture that
can impress but also reinvent itself in a digital flash to
accommodate the latest technologies. 

Determined to get the ball rolling, Eyebeam, a nonprofit
arts organization, has announced that Elizabeth Diller and
Ricardo Scofidio, who make up a Manhattan architectural
team known for avant-garde derring-do, have won the
competition to design a $60 million institute for new-media
technology that will make a giant leap away from
brand-identity architecture. The building will be around
the corner from the Dia Center for the Arts in Chelsea. 

The competition, which lasted 18 months, was difficult
partly because the type of building being created had
barely been invented. New-media technology - from videos of
virtual ballerinas to artistic experiments in genetics -
has gained popularity in the art world. Still, few could
pin down a medium so in flux that the devices used to
create it have a life span of only about three years, much
less describe a building that caters to it. 

A handful of institutions - among them the Ars Electronic
Center in Linz, Austria; the Institute of Unstable Media in
Rotterdam, the Netherlands; and the Center for Art and
Media in Karlsruhe, Germany - explore aspects of new-media
development. But one devoted to teaching, exhibiting and
producing the newest of the new in media art does not exist
in the United States. 

"It's an historical opportunity," said John S. Johnson, 35,
the founder of Eyebeam and an heir of the Johnson & Johnson
family. "What we do is nicknamed cultural research and
development; it's interdisciplinary, multidisciplinary and
employs quite a bit of technology. What we need is a
facility to support that architecturally in a deep way."
Eyebeam operates out of a renovated Manhattan garage on
West 21st Street, between 10th and 11th Avenues, where the
new institute will be located. 

In choosing an architect, Mr. Johnson was aided by the
architects Craig Newick and David Hotson, who renovated the
21st Street space but also had experience organizing
competitions, and by a cadre of new-media consultants from
the art and design worlds. Their target was not the usual
high-profile mavericks (Rem Koolhaas declined an invitation
to enter the competition), but rather the young and
digitally inclined. The first round of entries included 30
submissions and was reduced to 13 contenders, whose
preliminary designs were exhibited by Eyebeam in October.
Three finalists were chosen, including MVRDV of Rotterdam
and Leeser Architecture of New York. 

Diller and Scofidio proposed a 12-story, 90,000-square-foot
building that looks something like spliced ribbon candy. By
making the ribbon a two-ply sandwich of concrete and cast
fiberglass with all the cables, fiber optics, ducts and so
forth necessary for high-tech delivery as the sandwich
filling, the architects created a framework with a strong
identity whose infrastructure can easily be sucked out
every few years as new systems supersede old. 

On the interior, the traditional approach of relegating the
public to the ground floors and tucking all other rooms out
of sight has been discarded. The ribbon scheme makes for
public and private spaces - entirely column-free thanks to
a sophisticated horizontal truss system - that are
interwoven on every floor. Liquid-crystal glass walls turn
from translucent to transparent at a switch, letting
visitors and residents visually eavesdrop on each other; a
refreshment bar for meeting and greeting is on a ramp
leading to a new-media library. From a lobby floor seeded
with L.E.D. messages to a robotic spider loaded with video
cams that creeps across the building facade peering in
windows to report on the action, information technology has
infiltrated every surface. 

"Some see new media and architecture on different sides of
the fence," Ms. Diller said. "Our contention is that we can
no longer think of architecture outside of computing." 

Many of the competition's entries included folded planes
where floor, wall and ceiling flow as one; so many, in
fact, that Mr. Newick called it "the form du jour." But
Diller and Scofidio used the folded plane not only to
create spaces that are as malleable as any new technology
could hope, but also to integrate the widely disparate
activities in a way that few institutions have attempted. 

For Diller and Scofidio, it was a chance to think big. Much
of their completed work to date has been small or primarily
conceptual, from renovating the Brasserie restaurant in the
Seagram building, where video cams give everyone at the bar
a view of anyone entering, to designing an exhibition on
tourism for the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis that is
packed and displayed in suitcases. The team is in the early
stages of designing an expansion for the Institute for
Contemporary Art in Boston, the result of a competition
they won last year. The much-publicized Blur building, a
cloud of mist created by a complicated fretwork of spray
nozzles for Swiss Expo '02, is nearing completion at the
end of a long pier on Lake Neuchâtel. 

Mr. Johnson plans to finance the project institute with a
combination of municipal bonds and backing from a select
few families, including his own, that are committed to art.
His background is in independent filmmaking; in 1996 he
created the Filmmaker's Collaborative, a nonprofit
postproduction center in Manhattan for artists working in
film and video. But the open-ended network in support of
creative fervor that he envisions for Eyebeam was inspired
closer to home, at the Johnson Atelier in Mercerville, N.J.


Established by his father, J. Seward Johnson Jr., the
sculptor of wistfully generic human types cast in bronze
and positioned in numerous cities, the Johnson Atelier is
part foundry, resource center and open house, supporting
artists like George Segal and Julian Schnabel along with a
steady stream of students and artists in residence. 

"A place for people to make art that is wholly transparent
and putting it in Chelsea - what a great idea," said Ray
Gastil, the executive director of the Van Alen Institute,
which promotes public architecture. "Whether they can pull
it off, who knows?" 


http://www.nytimes.com/2002/03/21/arts/design/21DILL.html?ex=1017734519&ei=1&en=eb64f1d049c0a3d4