Gallery MA_Interrupted Projections / 1996
Tokyo

Sited just above the Nogizaka Subway Station and adjacent to Roppongi in Tokyo, Gallery MA is space devoted to exhibiting architecture and related design. This project was inserted into the third floor of a six floor building. On this level, an external quasi-zen-garden bounded by concrete walls cuts the floors above in half, creating an L shape building mass. A glass membrane divides the interior space from the garden and allows total visual invasion into the inserted project. The space is approximately 6.5 x 11 meters in plan and 2.45 meters in section.

An experimental space was the program for the project. More specifically, the ambition was to design a new spatial primitive for the electronic world.

The design scheme for Gallery MA is developed from the Homolosine Interrupted Projection Mapping System. The origin of the word map comes from "sheet", merely a surface to record territories on. The Homolosine Projection depicts the world in a series of sheared ellipses, thus the green surface inside Gallery MA is an "interrupted projection" as it deploys a flattened and empty global surface to form space.

The surface bends and loops to form a 3 dimensionally smooth yet complex geometry capable of merging with the graphically logoized world of visual codes and conventional signs. This is the WORLDSHEET.

Logos of fictional companies such as OVERCODES or UNIVOCAL are printed on the worldsheet. Each logo has a bar code next to it which triggers information onto a hand-held camera/screen known as a NAVICAM, an early code reader by SONY.

The project is in the permanent collection of the Canadian Center for Architecture.

A COR-TEX Architecture project.

Project Team: Neil Denari, Georg Kolmayr, Duks Koschitz, Raita Nakajima