Jason A. Grout       //      Architectural Design

Four organizations located in The Bread Box at 501 West Sixth Street, including Broke Spoke, Food Chain, Smithtown Seafood, and West Sixth Brewery, were chosen as clients for a new downtown multi-use structure. Taking primary lead from Broke Spoke and Food Chain, this downtown location focuses on movement and its perception by different observers as expressed through a new green technology. Two nodes created on either end of the long and narrow site are encircled by multi-use rampways cantilevering over Water Street. To accommodate for these cantilevers, this portion of Water Street is proposed to be restricted only to bicycle and pedestrian traffic. These ramps create a direction of precession running parallel to E Vine Street. To create a new point of interest, the entire structure is wrapped in a “surface” of vertical algae photo-bioreactor tubes regulated by Food Chain. These vertical tubes run perpendicular to the movement of the ramps and thus create a “Moire Effect”. The Morie Effect, while typically used in drawings, can be seen in UNStudio’s Galleria Centercity in Cheonan, South Korea. The varying tube diameters intensify this effect and create a contracting and expanding “surface”. The point at which the ramps cross vertically was used as the center of the Moire Effect. The thinnest tubes and ramps are located here allowing for a more direct view through the structure. As the tubes continue toward the nodes, they have a greater diameter and the ramps have a thicker profile. This allows the tubes to appear as either a single surface or individual entities depending on the position of the observer.