Projects

• The Manhattan Archive and Library

  The idea of building a new library in these days of the internet seems almost quaint. Something of a throwback to times when information wasn’t as accessible, yet overwhelming. Certainly the very idea of what is a library and what it can offer society has changed. When speaking of this change of idea, most young architect’s would try to challenge our preconceptions of what a Library is or offer us some theory of information diffusion cast in a formal strategy that expresses to the world, through Architecture the grand and revolutionary changes in the world of information today. Yet does every new building, let alone every library need to be a statement on society, or an expression of the world of information as a whole? Certainly such definitions of the problem are valid and important to the discussion of Architecture, but this is to the detriment of other problems.

  07.17.08 | no comments | Filed Under: Projects | Arthur McGoey

• Tribeca Telecommunications Switching Station

  Constructs.
  Architecture is inevitably an act of construction. Even such “paper” architects as Boulle or Lebbeus Woods engage in acts of construction or perhaps they might instead be said to engage more in acts of construing. Yet such a distinction does not only apply to those who theorize and do not build. For even the most practical and physically oriented architectural practice requires both an act of construing and an act of constructing. Implicit in the construing – constructing relationship is a production or becoming of a body. This body is not a whole but a population of pieces arranged in such a way to create capacities to affect other bodies or be affected by other bodies. Due to the fact that the joint or relationship between the pieces is what determines the becoming of the construct in the world, the joint is of great interest in any construing – construction process. Yet the body that emerges from the event of the joint constitutes the lived reality of our world and the embodied nature of things and ourselves in that world. In the end the problem of architecture is to address this lived reality including the way human beings and their bodies are embodied by this reality.

  07.06.08 | no comments | Filed Under: Projects | Arthur McGoey

• Pollock + Krasner Study Center

  Space is a natural thing to talk about when it comes to the art of Jackson Pollock. His drip paintings were flattened pieces of explosive space, both challenging the then dominate nature of the canvas as frame and the figurative nature of art. So when proposing a new building on the site of Jackson Pollock‘s and Lee Krasner‘s home in the Springs, Long Island, New York to house the administrative offices, research library, community events and academic programs of the Pollock + Krasner Study Center, one can not but help to think of space and the process of defining that space as an integral part of the design.

  06.22.08 | no comments | Filed Under: Projects | Arthur McGoey

• Brownsville Public Housing Development

  In their book, refabricating ARCHITECTURE, Stephen Kieran and James Timberlake discuss the implications of the prefabrication of modular components to architecture. They argue that through the realigning of the construction industry from an atomized state to a tiered organization similar to that of the aerospace and automobile industries architects will be able to design higher quality and greater scope buildings faster and cheaper. To build modular pieces of buildings one must move away from a purely systems approach and to a more integrated idea of building. A new spatial alignment of these systems is crucial.

  03.22.08 | no comments | Filed Under: Projects | Arthur McGoey

• Fulton Street Visitor and Transit Center

  A study in the ideas of qualitative performance as envisioned in William MacDonald of KOL/MAC Architects. The study was sited at the corner of Fulton St. and Broadway in New York City. This is the location of the for the Fulton Transit Center by Nicholas Grimshaw. The goal of the project from the MTA‘s standpoint was to reconfigure the confusing labyrinth of subway stations going through lower Manhattan.

  03.20.08 | no comments | Filed Under: Projects | Arthur McGoey