Aaron Jones Architect

Bronx Super Solstice

Architect in Residence
Bronx River Art Center
Bronx, NY

A vacant West Farms strorefront repurposed into a threshold between physical and digital space - linking disconnected users through a perpetual broadcast of sunshine.

This work questions the implications of digital media on existing and future architecture. Of increasing concern is the consolidation of use, as media driven space and requisite physicality merge into bytes. An office for example. This is less to do with the "work" and more to do with the "work place". In the case of this proposal, I seek an alternate future for spaces originally designed for street level retail. The store. This isn't to repurpose "shopping", as this act, much like "work" has found new outlets digitally. More specifically this proposal seeks to address the heavy remnants of shopping's physical past. Of particular interest is the storefront itself, and the opportunities storefront glazing offer as interactive media surface.

The project specifically consists of expanded polystyrene forms, which are hot wire milled into a seemingly primitive structural system. The individual buttress forms are hollowed into tubes, which in-turn house a careful network of T5 fluorescent lights. The materials, forms, and systems are engineered in an effort to showcase their weight and assembly in juxtaposition with a heavy, slow architecture. The overall system affixes itself to a vacated West Farms storefront, proposed to now house multimedia A/V equipment which backlights glazing with a projected ( live ) sunshine. This pavilion typifies the marriage of physical and digital space while asserting a primordial common ground - the perpetual broadcast of our sun. The resultant “use” therefore becomes an expedition of global time and space, from the Bronx.