gNa+ proposes access to the water sheet and a new form of conveyance across Fort Point Channel to the south of Summer Street as a variation of the Channel's celebrated mechanical bridges. 

The Diurnal Piers are a series of linked, rotating, floating platforms that constitute broad platforms when retracted, and extend as occupiable horizontal scissor-lifts powered by the tides, allowing visitors to walk out onto the water, crossing from one side to the other when two Piers meet mid-Channel. The surprising transformation of the Piers from linear docks to sinusoidal figures on the water sheet alludes to uncoiling of the tides, eddies and flows of water, and to the meandering paths of Boston's Public Garden, comprehended from above not only by observers looking down from bridges and sea walls but also by the inhabitants of the buildings that flank the Channel. The Piers will create a new destination and landmark for the city, a place for a spectacular new experience of the waterfront as well as a platform and stage for performances and forms of artistic expression.  

 

The Piers comprise pairs of counter rotating diaphragms, hinged together at a center pivot and to other pairs, supported by standard dock floats. A rack and pinion mechanism engages vertical pilings or the Channel sea wall to harness the kinetic rising and falling with the tides, extending and retracting the Piers. As the tides lift and drop the floating Piers, pinions located at the pier anchorage engage a vertical rack fixed to either the sea wall or pilings. A drive train translates the rotation of the pinions to the anchored ends of the Pier platforms, spreading or contracting the Pier ends and retracting or extending the Piers. The switchback ramp system required to bring visitors from the top of the sea wall down to the water sheet shares the visual language of the criss-crossed Pier diaphragms.  Each Diurnal Pier will have LED illumination at its joints adding to the after dark glitter of lights on the Channel, emphasizing the compression and the extension of the Pier through the changing distances between the lights as the Piers extends and retracts. Eventually different Pier configurations and pairings could activate the Channel along its entire length, with various programs such as fresh water swimming pools or beverage and food bars deployed on floating platforms attached to the ends of the piers.  

Diagram showing the changing Boston shoreline and movable Channel bridges.

Our proposal acknowledges the incredible importance of Boston's seafaring past by alluding to both the piers that bristled from the city's shores, and to the unique bridges that opened and closed as cargo vessels shipped with the tides. The Fort Point Channel bridges are a national engineering treasure, represent an incredibly diverse and imaginative negotiation of conveyances on land and water, the mechanisms of turning gears, wheels, and counterweights echoing the Newtonian clockwork of the solar system, the diurnal rotations of the earth and moon that gives us the cycles of the tides, syncopated with day and night, work and play. The piers extend out into the water as a celebration of voyage and crossing, the reach of imagination, a freight of ideas, and the possibility of reconciling technological aspirations with an experience of the natural environment. 

Deployment of 1"=1'-0" prototype in the Charles River.

Special thanks to Beth Baniszewski, Michael Kyes, David Porter, David Rubino, and James Vayo. 

 

 

The MetaLoom is a project conceived in the spirit of collaboration at the convergence of weaving and architecture. It is a project about invention, creation and community as core constituents of human culture, a response to the disaffections of consumerism and spectacle, and a reassertion of the individual’s role in and contribution to society. A space and mechanism of communal effort, facilitating and amplifying the engagement of our bodies with built form and the process of constructing, the MetaLoom is performance, sculpture and device for making art.

 

2009 Sweetport Art and Music Festival, Bridgeport, Connecticut. 

Evoking the heavy timber construction of New England mill buildings and the looms of Herman Melville’s description “A Bower in the Arsacides” in Moby-Dick, the first iteration of the Metaloom is a 12’H x 16’W x 5’D two harness weaving loom constructed of lumber (mostly fir) and metal hardware, comprising a warp as ruled surface between two discontinuous, oppositely curved beams suspended within a rectilinear frame.  This Metaloom is an expression and exploration of community --and our fundamental shared humanity-- through a project combining weaving traditions with architectural considerations at a scale capable of activating public space. Designed specifically for a public, interactive installation at Webster Hall in New York City, but with the flexibility to be exhibited elsewhere, the Metaloom is of a collective scale, requiring group effort to construct as well as operate. At the scale of architecture, the space and operation of the loom fully engage the body of the weaving participant. To operate the Metaloom, participants must step into it, and into the fold of the warp, the weight of their bodies depressing the treadles which constitute the floor of the space, shifting the harnesses overhead which, with a dramatic swish, flip the shed of the continuous vertical warp. You must insert your hands into the space of the shed to pass the shuttle. There is no beater so you must use your fingers as combs to compact the weft. Portions of the loom are so wide that a single individual cannot weave on it; you must pass the shuttle to a companion to continue, from one end to the other, back and forth. You can stroll along the warp inside the loom, running your hand over the threads as if playing a harp. To encourage the broadest range of participation, two of the six treadles are designed wide enough to accommodate wheelchairs. The piece is important not so much in the way it refers to competing notions of the origins of space making –timber frame or woven surface? Laugier or Semper?—but in the way it engages the participant in the collaborative creation and utilization of space, of literal and metaphorical shelter, employing fundamental technologies so widespread and ancient as to constitute material analogies to Carl Jung’s “collective unconsciousness.” The Metaloom guides us away from the misconception that these technologies, through their associations with pre-industrial culture, are somehow non-technological and therefore “natural,” while seeking to reaffirm the mytho-poetic status of a domesticated technology which was once so pervasive and important that it represented both a way of life and a metaphor for living. The intended weft of the Metaloom is decidedly post-industrial: film from home movies, old home video tapes superseded by DVD, cassette tapes of favorite music kept for sentimental reasons, shredded or unraveled clothing…mass-produced threads which once situated individual identity within the collective, recycled as individual contributions to a post-consumer work of communal art. 

 

 

 

Textile Arts Center, New York.

 

The MetaLoom is an ontological machine, providing a powerful physical metaphor for the integration of cyclical and linear time within a folded, constantly becoming boundary of space. 

   

"Creative Block", Webster Hall, New York City, as part of the 2009 Obie Awards celebration. 

 

MetaLoom installations done in collaboration with Textile Art Center, NY.