Museum of Exchange

Museum of Exchange

99 Bowery, New York, NY

Settled in within Chinatown the Museum of Exchange exploits the latent rituals within the Chinatown, specifically the studies of the nature of the honored tradition of wrapping the goods that are being exchanged and purchased in red, a symbol of luck.  This modern day translation of commodity, exemplified by the proliferation of the red bag and the color red represented the connection to a cultural and neighborhood identity that was innate in the prior object studies. The Museum of exchange also seeks to reveal the nature of commodity of the objects in both the marketplace and the museum share characteristics that the users may not be immediately aware of and other latent conditions by displacing and juxtapositioning the objects and spaces against one another, hopefully bringing these relationships to the forefront, such as the items on display as an object of art while the market speeds behind the other side of the wall.  The nature of the wall is the decodifier for these interactions and relationships to occur. At a local and global scale within the building, the wall reveals the inherent properties of the objects it contains, while contrasting them against one another. It also acts as a wayfinder through the space for the displaced user. The user in many ways becomes like the object, displaced and reoriented based on the weaving of the wall throughout the Museum.

Market Rituals within Chinatown

Performative Tasks of the Wall Between Programs

Market Exchange

Ritual Exchange

East West Section and Ground Floor Plan

North South Section and Second Floor Plan

Market Displacement within the Museum

Ritual Displacement within the Museum

Massing Model

Conceptual Massing Model

Conceptual Model of the Wall

Initial Studies Regarding Ritual-Object to Ritual

Initial Studies Regarding Ritual-Ritual to Object

Museum of Exchange-Abstract Studies

Initial Studies of  Taxonomy and Organization

Adjusting the Grid, Abstract Studies

Filling the Grid, Abstract Study

Taxonomizing Repetition

Public Art Lab

I am creating an art institution that creates a new relationship between the public and the artist.  There are many other institutions that exist within NYC, but not like this one.  For instance, Art in General is a non-profit organization that helps produce new work.  Creative time is dedicated to public art.  There are also museums like Moma and the New Museum that exhibit high art.  This institution pulls these ideas into one place and introduces the public in a whole new way.  The public is now made part of the process, and the building can be seen as a laboratory for testing and producing public art.  The building is a giant canvas filled with voids and surfaces where artists are invited to create and test their ideas.

The public program has been divided into three zones: the pay galleries, the free areas, and the artist/education workshops.  The pay galleries help support the institution financially and will hold curated shows.  The free areas serve as attracting points to draw the public through the building so they will encounter the art and can be used as test subjects in artistic experiments.  The artist zones serve to unite the different groups of people in collaboration around the artwork.

The public will be drawn into the building by pulling the public park onto the site from the Chrystie side.  Along the way, they would encounter labs and voids, both testing grounds for new art.  These lab zones serve as connecting elements between the free people, the pay people, and the artists, themselves.

Museum of Translation

The act of translation is a complex but necessary process that is inevitably tied to questions of authenticity and agenda.  The Museum of Translation explores these complexities between a continuously rotating pair of languages that illustrate diaspora narratives.  Through a play of angled solids and voids, the two sides of the museum are negotiated by “translators” that frame a variety of understandings of translation as the visitor travels both through and between languages.  The experience of the museum should provide critical spaces for consideration of types of translation so that the two sides, though distinct, start to overlap and exchange through these areas of translation.

Below are select images from the project.

 

Museum Mall of Galleries

This institution proposes to destroy the Lower East Side art district by absorbing all of the galleries in the surrounding area and forcing those out which don’t assimilate. Utilizing the warped waffle slab, The musuem creates a vocabulary of subversion whose internal logic challenges the authority of the Museum and the autonomy of the Gallery.

Museumus Propono Defero

Study of the Jewish Museum’s Man Ray Exhibit exploring the use of curation to manipulate identity.

Re-taxonomized Man Ray Exhibit exploring the use of a single space to create multiple narratives.

Path Diagram through the museum.

East-West Section

The project forms a museum space that forces the creation of multiple overlapping narratives.  Central to this aim is a critique of the Museum of the Diasporic Community’s role as a displacing agent.  Therefore the museum is organized around a false dichotomy between the preservation of local community and the acceptance of diasporic community and through promoting slippage between the two sides, parallels and differences are exposed.  These moments of slippage as well as moments of forced juxtaposition allow for the choice of path through the museum to understanding.

Museumus Luminarium

The “Luminarium” project is an attempt to juxtapose the inherent qualities of light (both natural and artificial) as a way to re-contextualize the special elements of a museum.  Lighting is an intrinsic element of all buildings, yet is often negated as an architectural feature, even though the implementation of lighting can both generate and augment the atmospheric conditions of a space.  For example, work spaces require a cold, high contrast light, while large multi-use spaces require much warmer, brighter, low contrast lighting.  When separated, these lighting variations may go completely unnoticed.  But, by highlighting this juxtaposition, a new contextualization of programmatic function and connotation becomes apparent.

However, merely placing two different lights next to one another does not generate the type of juxtaposition necessary to generate any real spacial differentiation.  This is because there is a difference between a hard architectural boundary (such as a wall) and a soft atmospheric boundary (such as light spilling out of a doorway).  It is therefor necessary to create an element upon which this atmospheric condition may be registered in contrast to the hard architectural boundary.

[Img. 1-3 | Studies of the relationships between hard architectural boundaries and soft atmospheric boundaries]

[Img. 4 | Study of atmospheric properties within a Chinatown Facade]

[Img. 5 | Taxonomic classification of all programs within the museum by their inherent lightning characteristics]

[Img. 6-7 | Renderings of Bowery and Chrystie Facade's]

[Img. 8-9 | Interior renderings of the Bowery lobby and the Digital Media Gallery]

[Img. 10 | Exploded Isometric of major building components]

[Img. 11| Diagrammatic representation of augmented lighting conditions]

[Img. 12 | Exploded Isometric of the "Atmospheric Wall's" structural system]

[Img. 13 | Longitudinal building section]

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