Footprints
or
“I don't have a photograph, but you can have my footprints. They're upstairs in my socks.”
Groucho Marx
Renewable Times Square, rfp 2010
With Landscape Architect Frank Barbour
Can the city we live in control how we walk through life? Can gridded streets, train stations, office buildings, and parks shift our movements as much as our desires?
New York City increases and decreases our pace with frequent stoplights, quick deli visits, interactions with strangers, and pauses for the bizarre. Our city’s grid, pedestrian traffic and constant commerce dictate brisk walks between pauses -- different than the longer strolls of San Francisco, London, or Copenhagen. Our gait is continuously interrupted challenging our sensory comfort levels; smells, sounds, packed streets.
The design of a city determines how we move through its streets but can we, the citizens, alter this design? Times Square’s makeover makes us think so.
For reNewable Times Square we propose Footprint’s, a design that replicates the pace of New York life and inspires people to contemplate their movement patterns within the city. With an interactive footprint design-- a patriot blue base pattern consisting of a gradient of white footprints with integrated interruptions that ask the walker to take physical or mental action.
This pattern provides not only a gradient colorful design but graphically depicts how people travel within our city. The footprints increase from stillness to running and decrease back to stillness twice in each block. By marking the daily tracks of millions of people in white we invite them to leave their own footprints behind.
As this city constantly interrupts us, we interrupt our gradient pattern with various footprints linked to written phrases; “One giant Leap,” “family photo,” “what’s your carbon footprint?” These interruptions provide simple reflections on life, develop personal interaction, and enhance enjoyment for both children and adults.
Footprint’s gradient pattern and interactive interruptions raise questions on how we walk through our city while highlighting the DOT’s bold decision to renew Times Square.
155 North 3rd Street #15, Brooklyn, NY 11211 • jon(at)thewindmillfactory.com • 818-987-9435