Unboundary: Tactonic spaces V1.0
SEPTEMBER 27TH, 2013
The project for Tactonic spaces Version 1 is an analysis of context in the public square (piazza, platz, agora) in the form of a tenuous exploded platform of varying surfaces in the international modern treatise. The shifting plates are embedded with a conversive interface to promote dialogue and exploration of communicative architecture, extending into the surrounding landscape of vernacular street architecture and the connected soft-wired topography.

Digital analysis of a 140′ x 80′ landscape of the public space. Space is divided into programmed quadrants of seating, elevated stage, in-ground graded stage, and interactive soft-wired open-programmed table seating. The heart of the area is the interactive plates for communication and entertainment.

Design considerations for physical access, visual and cartographic ease, fluid and constructive use of space are ingredients to enable non-directed programming, engendered by the access of information on large-format human scale environments. The variable of scale plays a key role in the inversion of content typically reserved for the private, closed interactions of personal devices and hardware, now metastasized to the public realm of scrutiny.

Local precedents demonstrate the use of public spaces to be safeguarded and programmed for the citizens (Dundas square). The process for the use of this space requires an application of intent for city review and approval of activations up to 12 months of advance planning and booking with a fee. Use of Dundas square, sustained by the exchange of mercantile adspace, activates an alternate world of insular advertorial environments, a reality constructed to procure a state of brand communities as commodities both latent and explicit. Tactonic environments suggest that content is populated and managed by the inhabitants, who become active audience and participant. Rules of engagement are to be self-determined and evolve over time, but the catalyst for a constructive dialogue must begin with a determined concept that serves the public. This concept could be as prescriptive as an ethos of ‘do no harm’, or ‘inspire’, but in an investigation of a principle methodology (vs constructive), the foundation is (pro)cured in a question, eg. “what is good?” , an invitation for many variants and causes to be generated in an on-going transformable dialectic. In a reversal of Cause and Effect, the effect is to create a space re-defined to engage public agents and locality; the cause is the content generated by the figure/ground relationship of people and culture inhabiting and co-creating a re-public ownership.