X CONTINUUM

2020

abstract

Science fiction, culturally and architecturally, is often concerned with anthropogenic transition: how civilization progresses, technology expands, or familiar experience warps.

X Continuum, a museum of science fiction for downtown Albany, New York, speculates on a post-digital society by digitally manipulating physical transparency. Materiality and virtual reality merge in a project deeply concerned with orientation. Exterior forms and projections draw visitors to the interior experience, where virtual distortion leads to inward reflection. Although the focus of the studio was in construction assembly and design development, we aimed to create a building of future-forward introspection that cleverly engages passerby without needing to provide a ticket.

interior

The experiential nature of the museum invites visitors to engage, challenge, and take agency in the procession of spaces.

After entering at ground level, visitors are brought to the top-floor lobby in a digitally-manipulated elevator that blurs the line between reality and projection as outside and inside blur with ascension. From there, visitors descend into the expansive atrium which coils around a subterranean amphitheater. There is no static circulation, but rather a decentralized set of descending experiences that build on one another before the guest is “spat back out” in a final incline to ground level.

Immersive gallery spaces wrap around the open atrium as tracked walls and projectors gradually transform the interior from clean canvas to digital dystopia. These fluid walls emphasize horizontality by utilizing running striations to carve space, and as visitors progress down the warped ribbon, factual matter blurs with augmented fiction.

Traditional exhibits are traded for theoretical experiences that imagine possible futures beyond known matter.

circulation

An inverted circulation drives the series of carved forms and exhibit experiences. Visitors enter at one of two end cores and are brought to the elevated lobby in immersive, digitally-manipulated elevators that introduce the central theme of “blurring” reality and projection as they make their ascent.

Both cores attach to an elevated lobby, where guests can glimpse the city of Albany through regular windows. This certainty is warped as they descend to the depths of a domed theatre, experiencing a decentralized circulation structure of descending experiences that build on one another until guests are below-grade. Glazed context views are less frequent with each level, and as matter becomes augmented, the line between spatial reality and science fiction blur beyond comprehension.

section

A constructed section illustrates the museum’s primary elevator core, interior atrium geometry and slope, spatial programs, levels, circulation, and relation to the adjacent context building.

plan

The form modulates itself with elevation changes surrounding the central atrium. The spatial language plays with visibility, constriction, descent, perception, and fluidity.

Though X Continuum’s content excels in closed environments, the project is limited in its ability to operate beyond an autonomous space for individual introspection related to digital futures. In attempts to address this, the building is capable of projecting its contents onto the facade and building site.

images

special thx

• J Crandall (for the support and solidarity)

• my family (for taking care of each other during the pandemic)