ALIS

ALIS Battery Park Bench Competition Entry
Team: Edward Kim, Tommaso Casucci, Charles Jones, Mike Nesbit

_Never static, the open nature of public park space engages a constant flux of activity. This activity allows for the emergence of processes for translating social & environmental behavior into urban systems & spaces. This opportunity resists the notion of static formal solutions in the interest of engaging the solution itself as a continuous process.

_Battery Park, a true territory of continuous process, serves as a significant platform for exploration in the design of public space. Both the transient and fortified qualities of the Battery play an emergent role in the genesis of ALIS. Once ALIS is directly engaged by the user, the relative lightness of the object re-informs the user’s understanding of the initial static nature of the object. ALIS now becomes an object of potential energy which can be repositioned and redistributed throughout the Battery Green. This characteristic allows users to continuously reprogram the social role of ALIS. ALIS thus becomes a daily marker for displaying the history of circulation and use across Battery Park. 

_ALIS is configured to purposefully exhibit this compound nature by resonating between system and environment.  As a distant object, ALIS is perceived as object fortified in the landscape. As a cluster, ALIS functions as a continuous perimeter of vantage points, an extroverted characteristic that reinforces the transient nature of public space and use interpretation. As a system, ALIS forms a constellation of spaces throughout the Battery Green prompting activities at all scales. As a temporal instrument, ALIS transforms as day turns to night by illuminating from within. 

_ALIS is constructed through the process of renewable resource plastic injection molding. The integration of this process is typically found in the mass production of banal commodity rather than art. Injection molding is the most common form for manufacturing plastic products. As an application to serve public parks, this technique has traditionally found its way into the playful structuring of urban playground equipment. ALIS acknowledges this well established vernacular not for its style, but rather for its desire to exist simultaneously as commodity and art. The structuring of this desire, rooted in functional and economic logic, becomes the formal and material expression of ALIS. ALIS efficiently redistributes external forces through its composite skin system. This skin system maintains a constant surface enclosure thickness while responding to areas of higher impact stress by the integration of fiber bundles. The networking of these bundles comes together to form deeper cross sections in material thickness thus providing optimum structural integrity. Subversive by day, these strands emerge as the sun sets to establish an alternate formal dimension. 

Future shock preview

Project Team: Edward Kim, Benny Cemoli, Oliver Lao, Morgan Tang

Dystopian futures have been conjured by our most critically acclaimed storytellers and continue to be notably entrenched in contemporary popular culture. They act as parables to guide us through swiftly changing times that confront traditions and
bring forth new challenges.

Cinematic and literary representations use architecture to reflect and emphasize the sociocultural challenges being examined.
In Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, monolithic and oppressive buildings hover over dark streets in an impoverished future where airships tout the escape to the better life beyond the stars. In other Philip K. Dick stories envision similar scenarios, in which
the earth becomes an ecumenopolis ‐ the whole world is engulfed in urbanity and suffering from an unknown crisis.

Inspired by the powerful vision of these precedents, we imagine how society would structure itself to exist in a world where
the skyscraper reigns supreme. We envision a world state in which a social gradient emerges where those who live in the sky
lead fundamentally different lives than those in the lowermost layers of the city. Always reaching higher and in a constant state
of construction and renewal, the chasm widens between those in the canopy and the darkening realm below. Far from fantasy,
we see this future as a possible outcome in increasingly dense cities as the earth’s population shifts to an increasingly urban
one,where environments are stretched to their sustainable limits, and current economic and political models fail to author
other realities.

 

ground detail_1 

sky detail_1 

UB1K Chair

KABUKI

Kabuki with Stephen Mora of CRAF+T 

for SMI Conference

Fabrication

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