SHALMALI WAGLE
Architecture | Theory | Journalism

INVERSE TIMES SQUARE. (Glamour and Decay in the Heart of the World's Busiest City - Hitchcock, Freud and Architecture)

A Themed Entertainment Project 

 

Derived at the intersection of cinema and psychoanalysis, an almost devious and perverted architecture devices spaces that manipulate user experience to induce
certain reactions. Set bang in the middle of the famous Times Square in New York City, the urban intervention, with its very idea of the stark juxtaposition of the frantic city and the decay of the mind becomes a testament to globalization, and emphasizes the resulting psychological void and banality – the slaying of pleasure in a place designed for pleasure. The intervention strives much like the City itself, to reach a mythical point where the environment is completely fabricated by man, so as to absolutely coincide with his desires – with distorted representations of reality in the form of most fundamental illusions. The overall experience aims at a safe transition of the user from normalcy to madness and back through architecture.