BIOTOPOLOGICAL SCALE-JUGGLING ESCALATOR

2013, Dover Street Market New York (by Commes des Garcons)

Designed and built for Comme des Garcons’s Dover Street Market – New York, this architectural piece manifests a fifty-year long research about resisting the aging process. The BSJE includes numerous characteristics that aim for a body to increase its awareness of its architectural surrounds. The name of the escalator expresses its most active procedure: the Biotopological Scale-Juggling procedure. When walking up or down the ESCALATOR a person encounters scale-models that increase her awareness of the space surrounding her body, thus constructing an “Architectural Body” (body proper + architectural surround).

The BSJE operates against the aging process through a variety of architectural means that trigger cognitive understanding: numerous scales, gradient effective colors, diagonal symmetry, different diameters of four serpentine handrails and different colors of steps, etc. It is itself the scaled version of the Reversible Destiny Lifespan Extending Module that encompasses many other architectural procedures, and operates differently depending on its rotation. The ‘wings’ that constitute four of the five rooms of this module are present in the form of the scaled-models encountered in the BSJE by the body that is able to virtually reconstruct the original module.

From the clothing she wears (architectural works contiguous with body-organism) to the architectural surrounds or the areas of volume she inhabits (architectural works which enclose body-organism), a person continually takes cues for what she is to become from architectural design in four dimensions (and counting). Entities existing as puzzle creatures to themselves, human beings, that is, can use this architecture for studying what goes on as life and learning how to age with grace and magnificence.

 

Detail

BIOTOPOLOGICAL SCALE-JUGGLING ESCALATOR

Dover Street Market New York  (160 Lexington Avenue New York, NY 10016)

Completed 2013.