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[MUSIC PLAYING]
We have one week to go.
The opening is in a week from today.
We're behind schedule a lot because the weather has been
really bad.
We're about 80% done.
You can see there's a gap here where the final
panels have to go on.
When people walk by, they ask, does it say something, which
is what we were originally interested in.
In the same way that it's not immediately obvious that this
thing is made of skateboard pieces and it takes a bit more
effort to figure out what that is, we're also interested in
the idea that you get a hint that it says something.
And that provokes a questioning, which I think
makes the architecture much more conscious.
The basic move is basically to take the canopy idea and to
flip it on its side.
So you produce a wall that can create just as much shade as a
canopy can create as long as it's tall enough and it's
oriented correctly.
We started to realize that it starts to have a dialogue with
the visual context, the signs and the billboards that make
up the skyline of Long Island City.
We started to think about the legibility of a sign, which is
really obvious, versus the legibility of architecture,
which is something that's much more abstract, and to somehow
plays in between those two.
To write "wall" with the letters would've been too much
about the object and not in relation to the
space that it was in.
To reverse it and flip it so that the wall itself casts a
shadow that says "wall" made it become much more about the
ground and the sun.
We knew that we had to be more creative about the way that we
were thinking about materials than we were.
We went to the Cornell Materials Research Lab, and
they mentioned Comet skateboards and the fact that
they're an eco-friendly design company.
I spoke to Pat Govang from Comet skateboards.
And he said, you're not going to believe it.
We just walked out of a meeting where we were
discussing, what will we do with our waste product.
We had these two things at the same time.
We had the wall of chairs, and we had the wall
of skateboard bones.
While the skateboard pieces that we've been using for the
facade with the cutouts are called bones, the uncut pieces
are called blanks.
And we're using the blanks on the bottom row of the wall.
We're attaching legs.
And they'll become benches.
So this is one of the bone panels.
And you can see some of the bones stay intact, and some of
them get sliced so that they can be interwoven.
And that means that rather than having panels that have
openings like this, the openings become much smaller.
There's a much finer grain to the wall.
And it produces the kind of light that comes through the
leaves of a tree.
We have 3,000 of these bone pieces in the project.
And instead of going on site with 3,000 pieces in a
five-week construction time, we decided that it would be
wise to panelize those pieces, which means taking about 20
bones and weaving them together into four-by-eight
panels so that when we get on site we have 150 panels to
install instead of 3,000.
It's really pretty amazing to be inside.
The breeze still comes through, but the sun doesn't.
You can see this nice dappled light effect
that it produces here.
But what's pretty amazing about being in here is that
it's so intimate, when from the outside this thing seems
to be so monstrous and intimidating.
Every horizontal bands serves a set of strip lights that run
along there.
The idea that the lights point towards the bags so that the
bags have a glowing effect like a chandelier.
It's a really strange experience to see it realized.
Because, on one hand, we're so familiar with this.
It looks like we designed it.
The structure, it's a slightly different color from the
renderings, but otherwise it's identical.
The panels have a little bit more three-dimensionality, but
otherwise they're identical.
So on one hand, it seems really familiar, and we're
saying to each other, yeah, of course, that's
exactly what we planned.
And then, on the other hand, there are so many surprising
effects that we didn't imagine.
I think what's been really exciting today to see on the
first day is the kids coming in and just saying whatever
they think and running into the water
and getting so excited.
And all of those things, of course, they're not things
that we normally think about in the rendering that we have.
And then on the inside, it's really very intimate.
Even the acoustics seem to dampen the sound.
And it seems much more intimate and warm in there.
We have all, myself an all of the volunteers and the whole
CODA team have really enjoyed ourselves.
We've learned an amazing amount by being on site.
We learned technical things, but we've also learned about
things like attitude, what it means to have a good attitude
and to be willing to do things and to work hard.
I'm very sad that this is finished, because I would like
to keep working on it.
I've had such a good time, and I think the whole team has had
a good time.
I don't think they'll let us do this again next year, but
we definitely want to keep going.