date:		1997
location:		Wall Street, NYC
competition organizer:		Van Alen Institute, NYC
project type:		Institutional
status:		Competition

Located at the eastern end of Wall Street, the Cultural Information Exchange Center, was designed to be a temporary structure. The small scale of the site, in comparison to the large neighboring sites, brought up the challenge of designing a small structure, that can hold up against the monumental scale of surrounding buildings. Temporariness was understood as a way to generate architectural form.

Capture the elaboration of a conceptual process started by an attempt to create a new architectural space, without getting involved in the early stages of design with any reference to buildings typology, or architectural repertoire of form. The space was considered as ether, and the design intention was to capture a space rather than imposing one. To accomplish this goal, the process of design started with computer simulations, using "flock animation".

Ether The building was considered as a flow of bodies and information through space, over time. The programmatic elements were modeled as attractors on the site. Visitors, information and exchanges were modeled as particles. Once the particles attracted, they started forming varying degrees of concentration. A halo of particles was floating over the site, suggesting an eventual architectural space. As a cloud in the sky, the particles halo started forming a virtual building, an interrelated spatial field. This constellation was crystallized to form the new Temporary Cultural Information Exchange Center.