Brand Avenue

Interaction and Choreography

In a moment where "interactivity" has become as ubiquitous and desirable as social networking and wi-fi, the design of an ambitious new public space in San Francisco expresses how ideas of interactivity can bear themselves out architecturally and urbanistically.

Physical connectivity, material contrast, and consumer choice come to the fore, along with event planning and even furniture design:

These clearings in the urban jungle point to what we can expect as the city grows; the best designs and spaces will be interactive in the way these plazas are, with new stores, arts and music venues and digital playgrounds. They are interactive in the simplest way - you walk through them. In addition, venues linked to them use technology to make it possible for visitors to personalize their experience, whether it is while looking at art or engaging with a history museum.

These plazas are not Disney-fied in the way of Belden Alley or other gentrified alleys in the city, which have French or Italian themes. Instead, the new spaces provide a smorgasbord that you can mix and match at will, just as you do when you go inside some of the buildings. Museum placards and curators' captions alone will not be the only voices you hear. You will hear artists' points of view, too.

Mint Plaza, formerly an alley in the SoMa neighborhood, surrounds the future home of the Museum of San Francisco and the Bay Area. Inside, the museum will offer a range of high-tech accoutrements that allow users to customize their visit:

Voice and motion triggers will be incorporated in the $90 million museum - not just to be au courant, Chadbourne explains, but because it will make the museum truly interactive. Computer chips embedded in walls and tabletops will enable people to summon information for their own versions of history, allowing them to chart the progress of their own ancestors from the time of the Gold Rush. For example, Italian Americans with roots in the city will be able to call up maps that show where Italian Americans lived in the city and find documents or photos provided by the California Historical Society that might even lead them to the first place their family lived. Because the museum will not be set up in a chronological fashion, self-guided podcasts will let visitors customize their visits.

Above: project renderings and plan (via). The plaza was designed by CMG Landscape Architects of San Francisco.

In the plaza itself, the space is ordered very simply by the placement of two "rain gardens" that capture and retain stormwater; a steel trellis along one edge; minimal overhead lighting; and small changes in elevation. Echoing the customizable experience of the museum inside are groups of movable orange chairs that stand in sharp contrast to an otherwise subdued material palette. (photos below via Flickr)

Around the edges of the plaza are a varied assortment of (no doubt carefully selected) cafes and retail spaces that spill into and animate the space (including the one you may have read about where you can get coffee from a $20k halogen-powered "siphon bar.") Soon a number of food carts will further enliven the plaza's peripheries.

A non-profit agency created specifically for Mint Plaza programs the space with a changing schedule of music, film, and theater events, thus acknowledging temporality by engineering a variety of ways for the plaza to be used and seen. This dimension is so important because it underscores the notion that the design of physical space, by itself, cannot offer any guarantees of a dynamic, well-liked public space. In other words, the choreography of the Mint Plaza experience exceeds architecture and urban design--extending to event planning and easy access to nearby spaces--and how these things "communicate" or interact with the plaza architecturally and through program.

Traveling Without Moving

New York City's Lower East Side--the storied, once forlorn corner of the city turned crossroads of cultural production and wellspring of "cool"--is now brought into extreme proximity via the virtual transportation capabilities of the Internet. Rather than visiting the neighborhood in person, imbibe the local ambience via the MMOPRG Virtual Lower East Side online instead.

The world of VLES...is an idealized, Smurf Village reduction of the real Lower East Side, and yet instantly recognizable to anyone who’s logged more hours at Pianos than he cares to admit or ducked out to Rosario’s Pizza for a late-night slice....

Like their flesh-and-blood counterparts, the computer-generated residents of VLES (which opened to the public last week) are free to walk a familiar gritty strip between Houston and Rivington Streets, befriend one another, watch music videos, hang out at rock shows, form their own bands and get into as much after-hours miscreancy as the Web site’s programmers will allow.

Instead of a site about the Lower East Side, the site aims to be the Lower East Side, or at least a 3D visualization of it. A NYTimes reporter and LES resident describes what it's like to move from his physical environment to its virtual parallel:

It began as a typical night on the Lower East Side. A few weeks ago a crowd of young urbanites gathered in the bowels of Cake Shop, the pastry cafe cum music club on Ludlow Street, to see a performance by an indie-rock band, the Virgins. A couple of minutes into the show the subterranean space was already packed to capacity and smelling of stale beer, so I left.

I walked a few blocks to my apartment on Avenue A, turned on my computer, directed a small, pixelated representation of myself to enter a small, pixelated representation of Cake Shop, and rejoined the show. There were no imperious bouncers or foul odors to contend with, and no fluids of any kind expectorated on my shoes. Except for a slightly choppy video feed, it was by my standards a pretty successful evening on the town.

MTV, smartly interested in expanding its role as conduit between consumers and the music industry, developed the Virtual Lower East Side site to "leverage the cultural cachet" of the neighborhood, gambling on the idea that social networking of the future--the "future of music," even--will take place in 3D environments. Long a site of incredible possibility, the Lower East Side as retooled by MTV becomes the site of a new type of cultural production (not to mention consumer fantasy).

“It was a way for us to get back to our core virtues around music discovery and passion for new, underground subversive bands,” said Van Toffler, the president of MTV Networks’ music group and a 20-year veteran of the company.

And capitalize on them, obviously.

Game designers went to significant lengths to replicate the particular mix of cultural influences and physical form that inform the feel of the original:

Not every business and storefront is represented, but several landmarks are there, from the neon-lighted exterior of Katz’s Delicatessen (where I could press my digital nose against its salami-stocked windows, though I couldn’t go inside) to a fully explorable model of the club Max Fish, complete with a framed photograph of Julio Iglesias hanging above the bar, a “Pirates of the Caribbean” pinball machine and familiar messages scrawled on the bathroom wall.

To fill these knowingly grungy environs VLES’s creators turned to Judi Rosen, the fashion designer and proprietor of the downtown boutique the Good, the Bad & the Ugly, to photograph real-life denizens of the Lower East Side. Then they created a variety of avatars using her photographs for fashion reference. “You can’t just have generic skater boys,” Ms. Rosen said, “because there’s punk skaters, there’s hippie skaters, there’s graffiti skaters, there’s square skaters. All those little nuances mean a lot.”

But what does this portend for a sense of place? Can a virtual "place" ever approach the complexity of its physical counterpart? What is the real-world impact, if any, of virtual commodification? What happens when the Lower East Side no longer resembles the virtual version?

Moreover, what does it mean to make what was once the de facto province of very few become so instantly accessible to anyone? Is this what's next in "glocalization?"

For decades, the Lower East Side has derived its coolness from at least a veneer of danger and inaccessibility. Venturing there for the first time required risking the disapproval of the locals, whether they were the immigrants who once populated its tenements, the drug dealers who shouted from rooftops to warn of unfamiliar faces, or the bartenders and bouncers who didn’t recognize you as a regular. How can the area retain its mystery if anyone with a computer can experience some fraction of it?

“It takes something that was a neighborhood, and now it belongs to everybody else,” said Clayton Patterson, a photographer who has been shooting in downtown Manhattan for more than 25 years. “It’s the complete denial of your space, a complete theft of what it was that you lived in for years.”

Some longtime members of the community, however, said that VLES poses little risk to a district whose iconoclasm they feel faded away long ago. “The flavor’s already gone,” said Dick Manitoba, the frontman of the punk-rock group the Dictators and the owner of Manitoba’s, a bar on Avenue B. “The Second Avenue Deli’s a bank, the Fillmore East is a bank, and you’ve got to pass by 12 restaurants and coffee shops just to get to the couple of places that still have character.”

Ironically, the VLES is free from some of the more aggravating processes at play in the Lower East Side.

While VLES might be a fantasy of fetishized dirt and muck (to the point that its official logo is a big fat rat), it’s also a neighborhood without an impending sense of gentrification, exorbitant rents or luxury condominiums sprouting from every street. “It’s not an accurate representation,” Mr. Manitoba said, “but it could be a fun, entertaining thing, and if I guess if I lived in Nebraska, I would love to see it.”

(Related)

Local Color

While working on a project about the power of celebrity, Canadian product designer, teacher, and writer Todd Falkowsky encountered an intriguing question:

I asked myself whether there was something about, say, Cameron Diaz’s face we could apply to a cellphone or a car that would increase its appeal. I did something similar for the City of Toronto, trying to figure out whether it has a specific colour that could be used by Canadian firms, and it occurred to me that this could be done for all of Canada....

How do we approach and identify essential, commonly agreed upon qualities of place?

I began by taking scores of photographs and employed computer software to pull out the predominant colours of Ottawa and the provincial and territorial capitals. The exact process that worked in Toronto did not necessarily work elsewhere — there is also an intuitive element to it. For each city, I had to centre on what makes it unique, such as prominent landmarks or distinctive features of its built environment. As a result, regional differences emerge: the North tends to be very bright, the Maritimes aquatic, Ottawa pale.

The resulting paint chips--a distillation of each city's local landmarks, geography, and culture--are featured in this month's edition of The Walrus.

From my own travels a number of similarly evocative tones spring to mind--the cozy brick hues of Pittsburgh; the otherworldly neon blue of Lake Louise; the saturated green countryside of County Cork; the tepid pastel colors of houses in Maine. You probably have your own; but then, there's probably also some overlap, that goes beyond what color uniforms the local sports teams play and touches on things like environment, urban form, industry, climate, and light.

The abstraction of the color palettes presents an opportunity to grasp a place and its elusive "feel" at a basic sensory level; not only are these the colors that a place is made of, they are also literally what likely colors the experience of that place, which I find very compelling. (And reminiscent of this, too.) Even better would be a scratch-and-sniff version.