Final Tower Presentation

-Gasp!- At last, after days of painstaking diligence, the Bang Tower is complete, along with drawings and video! Hoooray for everything! It was an epic display of determination, madskillz and moxy on all of the group's part in the final few days of what I like to call the hardest studio ever. In the end, the group pinned up excellent projects and none of us will suffer a triple F- as threatened. Finally we can all return to so called reality and sleep for more than 3 hours a night. Can I get a woot!?

All the models were snapped into place on the site but this turned out to be completely pointless, unfortunately because our prof demanded the models be placed next to our pinned up drawings which meant it was impossible to see the buildings in context. This was a bit heartbreaking because some of us attempted to integrate others' towers into our own which was lost in this move. Nonetheless, we presented our towers one by one after a flashy introduction of the concept and program on a video we created in the dying hours of the night with panic sweats keeping us awake.

All of the towers were criticized for their weaknesses -- none for their strengths. My tower was criticized for having too rational a structure for so unpredictable of a conceptual phenomenon (i.e. atom smashing). Granted, there was a huge opportunity for a truly ridiculous structural solution but I felt that my floor plates were already overly aggressive and an irrational structure would just make things too incoherent. At the same time, I thought it wasn't really a fair criticism because had I chosen an unpredictable structure they would have equal reason to say I could have chosen a more rational structure. This kind of debate can go both ways. There was nothing to say about the actual final structure I ended up designing, unfortunately.

Aside from this, the question "why the mini tower?".
My tower sits on one of the main crossroads of the Hudson Yards, where pedestrians intersect at all levels. Because of this, I thought it would demand a greater footprint for commercial and pedestrian use, and also a higher density to encourage all the surrounding towers' programs. Secondly, based on the explosion concept which implies that energy is created and destroyed at the same time, one tower is for expending energy, the other for renewing it. It also had to do with setting up a "gateway" that looks down the entire site, while harnessing wind energy in the gap of both towers. It's also sitting on the "throne" of the site and so hierarchically I felt it demanded more presence, imposing a organization of the rest of the scheme.
They didn't quite bite down on these justifications, but it was probably because I was seconds away from falling asleep and could barely articulate these things.

The remaining criticisms were all over the map and weren't entirely useful to be honest. In fact to be totally honest, the critique was probably the biggest anticlimax we could have asked for. For such a brutal studio for its demanding level of production and quality, we didn't really get anything in return except euphoric relief to be finished. That in itself is priceless. (So is waking up in the same position 13 hours after the crit).

So, I won't bore you anymore. Here's the final video as I presented it at the crit (photos of the group project to follow).


This video is for educational purposes.