WIND RULE
The site is an off ramp to the locale of the games. As at most off ramps this space is a transition from the scale of high-speed travel infrastructure to that of slow stop-and-go traffic. This is a space not inhabited by pedestrians but viewed through the frame of a windshield. This is also a space of deceleration.
A field of totems marks a landscape sacrificed to speed. In addition to recalling the past condition of an uncleared wilderness, these vertical kinetic elements index the site through indicating the direction of the breeze. These poles pivot in relation to the wind, making visible that which is not experienced in the car.
TRAFFIC ISLAND
This proposal for a traffic island consists of an image of an antique engraving of poverty above a stainless-steel mirror that reflects and compares modern life.
"In an ironic reversal of the mid-eighteenth century myth of architectural origins that presented a vision of a self-sufficient "natural" man building his own shelter out of the materials of the forest, constructing a model for all subsequent architecture. Ledoux, in L'architecture depicted this "poor man's shelter" as a lone stunted tree growing out of a stony island set in an infinite sea. Beneath it a naked, shivering pauper holds out his hands in supplication to the skies, where, atop a bank of clouds that disperses the rays of the sun toward the earth--the first rays of enlightenment--the gods of Olympia and the muses of the arts and sciences are assembled, apparently ready to dispense their munificence. "The Architect is there," wrote Ledoux," surrounded by clouds". Clearly, if specialization of Metiers has removed from the poor the path of self help, the modern architect should be prepared to serve."
From, Claude Nicolas Ledoux: Architecture and Refrom at the End of the Acien Regime,
by Anthony Vidler
PARK PARK
As public space has been increasingly privatized, due in part to the car, it ceases to be of use or concern to the general population. Only at the scale of the environment as a whole is public space genuinely shared. Clean air and water are the base zero conditions of the public realm.
Ultimately, all parking lots should become parks, producers of clean air and water, rather than contributors to pollution. This proposal divides the site into a parking lot and a park, separated by a series of water filtration tanks. Runoff water is collected in gutters under walkways, channeled to the filtration tanks and pumped into reflecting/irrigation pools in the park, and up into cisterns to feed ivy-covered steel trellises over the walkways.
Mirroring the program of the Georgia Dome, the park supports a variety of activities from pre-game tailgate picnics to pick-up games of chess or basketball. message here
CLOCK TOWERS
HONORABLE MENTION
Clock towers have played a significant role in the physical and temporal definition of public space by allowing for the synchronizing of shared activities. From their honorific position in town halls and campanile, public clocks ushered in the shift from an agrarian to an industrial economy, setting the time for shop openings and assembly lines. However, the speed of the post-industrial world has tended to erode public space more than shape it. For today's commuters, traveling the expressway at 55 mph is the shared experience. The overpasses on Interstate 75/85 provide an opportunity to frame the new public realm with two vertical clocks aimed at the commuters, one recording the hours of the day, the other the days of the month. At the upper-level pedestrian ground plane, the operative mechanisms of the clocks, gravity-controlled boulders on inclined slopes reveal the curious lack of grounding of both the site and the time of contemporary digital speed. The rock propels the clock as it seeks to join the tree in an effort to complete a “natural” tableau, on a site that is completely resistant to vegetation. Finally, the tree itself is a clock of sorts, one that measures time at a pace quite apart from the world of the automobile.
