Tag: new york
Civic Center Map – Government Buildings
This week’s mapping assignment was to get lost somewhere in the city and map it out. I chose to go further downtown to Civic Center. This location holds buildings such as the Supreme Court building and City Hall. I wanted to map these buildings that had a particular architecture. Some government buildings like police headquarters had architecture that wasn’t as intricate, which is why I decided to not include them.
Here is the map I created with the buildings laid out on them.
This is the layout without the buildings.
The Story of the Block
Jane Street seemed to be a very quiet block that was out of the way of the crowded noise that typically weaves throughout the streets of New York. Not much activities went one. It is very still and is one of those undiscovered gems in New York. One would not expect much to happen on these streets, which is very hard to find in such a chaotic city.
Again with this project we went through a series of iteration to reach a final two pieces. This first draft was two sequence the buildings in the order they along one side of the street. Next was a sketch of that layout. This allowed us to gain a full perspective of how the block looked like during the entire scene. In this layout the numbers correlated with the placement of each building along the block.
On another layout we played with the images on a block grid. The purpose for this was to pay attention to detail of each building as we zoomed in and out of the images. We also looked for a significance for certain placings of images. For mine I decided to reflect the piece to an audio volume control. Some buildings I would zoom more or less into each buildings on both side of the street.
The last draft for the layout was to again understand placement of buildings. We would leave empty spaces for parts of images we did not want to give any attention to and only she the necessary parts of buildings. The images were also numbered to show what part of the building photo or drawing is being put on display. We only really looked at what parts on the buildings were really important and there was a rhythm to how much of how little we showed of the building
For the final collage piece I wanted to display that more action tended to gravitate towards the end of the street. As you got to the middle the piece focused on the events of the buildings. What in the building’s architecture really stood out. As you got inside the street it didn’t really matter what actions were going on because it was the atmosphere of the block that really mattered. But before you enter or after you exit the street, that’s when the typical busy New York pace takes place once again.
This also reflected within my booklet when I want to focus on highlighting any characteristics Jane Street had to offer. The layout and storyline were told in a way to portray the sequence of events by order of how I experienced the block myself
