Pentagram: Newark Gateways
New Jersey is often derided as epitomizing the banality of the American urban landscape. So, with that in mind, how do you create a visual brand for a city that is mainly known as somewhere to drive through? This is the question underlying Pentagram's recent Newark Gateways project, which proposes a series of distributed graphics to demarcate various points of entry into that city. The proposal challenges the idea that "the gateway" is an architectural construction and instead pinpoints a network of key locations with a series of patterns that are only really legible when viewed through satellite photography or perhaps from the window of an airplane.
[Route 21 and Miller Street - street view]
Pentagram describes Newark Gateways as follows:
Our design considers the nature of travel and Newark’s role as a hub. It is no accident that the assignment for the Newark gateways project was delivered as a Google Earth file: this is, more and more, the way we virtually “travel.” Our gateways address both remote and local audiences with a set of ideas that are legible in reality and cyber-reality. In our concept, a series of painted “events” on the Newark streetscape would bring Newark to the world, and bring the world to Newark.
It is interesting how much Google figures into the representation of this project and one could even read Newark Gateways as an experiment in civic search engine optimization (SEO). It foregrounds place through indexing key points within a homogenous urban fabric - Adam Greenfield's "search urbanism" interpreted by branding and wayfinding savvy graphic designers.
[Newark Gateways - keyplan]
This scheme also speaks to some of the ambitions within the so-called deconstructivist architecture movement for diagramming the fragmentary sociopolitical or historical forces that permeate the city. While the iconography of Newark Gateways is decidedly mute in terms of "meaning", these visual interventions still speak to the desire to inscribe the city with markup, to make it textual. Experimental architectural masterplans such as Daniel Libeskind's Out of Line (1991) and much of the earlier work of Peter Eisenman or Dagmar Richter operated within this theatre as well—demarcation as formalist play.
I'm kicking myself for not paying closer attention to Newark Gateways when Sean Salmon posted about it back in April. It reappeared on my radar by way of a Benjamin Bratton tweet where Bratton encapsulated the project as "internality of the border/ city-as-meta-interface/ overexposed portal/ edges-overtake-nodes sort of thing" - an apt microcritique.
Experience Optimization
I love the idea of marking 'place' to increase its visibility to to indexing systems. We have seen pseudo-attempts at advertising to airplane passengers on the roofs of building near airports or through images cut into agricultural fields that were surely seen by more people online, than in real life. Are we seeing an early attempt at increasing a cities stature and sense of importance, in a future type of search result? What happens to definitions of cities as great, historical, modern or otherwise as they attempt to boost there civic presence via methods completely external to urban experience.
Anamorphosis
re: "methods completely external to urban experience"
A few weeks back I saw an urban experience design proposal that pitched programmable bus shelter roofing signage. My memory of the project is a bit spotty but as I recollect it rested on people being able to upload graphics which would display via LED on the roof of the shelters. I didn't understand the proposal because it seemed like a lot of wasted effort just to set up these snazzy graphics that ONLY bus passengers would be able to see - and on an oblique angles as well. Newark Gateways gives the same kind of "privileged views" except it is more accessible - I like that it works "from the street", via satellite and also has a built in wayfinding/informational system. I think I am most partial to how you would experience this in a car though, passing through these wild pattern-fields.
I wonder what other similar mediated views you could capitalize on? My design mentor William Taylor is semi-obsessed with the idea of Anamorphosis—could set these up at an urban scale? I'm not so much talking about work like Michael Maltzan's MOMA sign but "images" or views that only show up through a database or maybe an augmented reality application. Hmmmmm...