Seeing & Being Seen
The facade of the former Time & Life Building, an iconic modernist New York City office building, is recapitulated as commentary on the nature of fine dining, the act of service and the theatricality of the social performance of affluence.

The former time and life building was an icon of modernism, not only in its architectural stature with deep air conditioned floor plates and regimented vertically articulated facade, but also as the generative site of the production of media and corporate culture of the modern era.

Rather than being exclusive and obscured within the body of the building, the re-opening of the Hemisphere restaurant is voyeuristically visible.

It set a code that was followed by the other adjacent office buildings built in the subsequent decades all with that same attitude of tower reaching up to the sky, set back from the street with a plaza that took a position on what a formal austere public space in Manhattan communicated about the entity that owned it.

At the time of this building there was a liveliness in these plazas, people sat and ate their lunches there, fountains flanked with seating were sites for casual encounters. Today these spaces are windswept and mostly unused, a new leftover space that mirrors a left-over attitude about what it meant to work in such a place.

At the top of the former Time and Life Building was a fancy restaurant that pivoted daily from being a place for lunch meetings and doing business during the day and a social club at night, a place for a different kind of business relationship building. This Hemisphere club serves as inspiration for this project. Rather than being exclusive and obscured within the body of the building, the re-opening of the Hemisphere restaurant is voyeuristically visible. The gestures, mechanics and social prescription of these ‘power-lunch’ fine dining institutions are pushed out and projected to the facade of the building: making well established, yet rarely acknowledged social ideology of served and server casteism visible as urban theater.

Lived experience of over a decade of fine dining weaves its way through questioning this particular social construct. The prescription of body posture and movement is codified as lexicon. Much like theater, the aim of a fine dining server is to create an experience for the guest. Gestures of service are a craft that is passed down, a craft that within it holds the power to be unseen, to move guests seamlessly through a ritual without being recognized for the overt control that it exerts on the social dynamic. Vestige plays a role not only as costume but as disguise. A female body in a man’s tuxedo shirt allows her to enter a professional arena she was formerly barred from. The realities of conforming such a garment to the female form belies the propriety it purports to exert. Pleats buckle. The garment developed in this project comments on these gestural and gendered constraints and highlights the body experience of being tethered to the table – body as extension of environment, for the purpose of presentationalism. This garment was installed at the site of the former Time and Life Building, as an act of subversion, worn on a body with the muscle memory of these prescriptions. This garment is a 1:1 model of the architectural proposal of this project – body as building, table as plaza.

The articulation of the pleat at an architectural scale learns from the moire effect, which occurs when two self-similar sets are displaced at varying degrees, in this case two sets of lines with one set skewed at either a 40 degree or 60 degree angle. Images of these overlays are uploaded to a digital surface and then through a process of digital degradation patterns and colors emerge. This skewed juxtaposition and way of looking make apparent a system that was always embedded, but was not visible. In this way, as inspiration for the facade system, by displacing and creating a new way of seeing, this project seeks to make visible what was formerly illegible in the social construct of fine dining service.

Fine dining is dying. Not because the social inequity created and re-created in these choreographies has been altered, but because the nature of its presentation has changed. With the advent of the digital age, there is a new manner of consumption and a new opportunity for re-constructing the social dimension of dining that has been withered away. This work raises the question of what is being obscured in our contemporary dining experiences of digitally on-demand delivery services?

And if fine-dining service as well as the culinary arts are respected as craft, is it possible to decouple this industry from social inequity?

And if fine-dining service as well as the culinary arts are respected as craft, is it possible to decouple this industry from social inequity?