Turning the Gear:
Performance — Act II
Act II
Scene 1
THE BIG BOX OFFICE
To turn the financial gear, 352 Somerset is in need of an anchoring tenant. The anchoring tenant will not supply a good source of revenue for the property owner but also ensures a stable financial state of the new Somerset House.
The 1890s house is also in need of a structural retrofit, so that the façade of this fabric heritage at the corner of Bank and Somerset Street can continue to anchor onto the historic site that has witnessed Ottawa’s transition from an industrial town to a city supported by businesses of different scales. To invite the anchor tenant as soon as possible, a box is prefabricated off-site and assembled on site. The deteriorated interior floors have been stripped away and replaced with a new structure to welcome the insertion of the box, the Big Box Office. The box appears afloat, leaving the ground level longing to be filled with air and movement. It is the Blank Space that will be taken over in no time by both artificially propagated greeneries and daily engagement of human activities. It is an internalized botanical landscape that keeps the city dwellers reminded of the reprise of seasons and the scents of moistures in the soil where life sprouts and grows. As the sunlight travels through the gaps between the Big Box and the 1890s façade unintended by any architect’s vision, time leaves its trail for the inhabitants of the space to catch. Soon the trail of light disappears as one tries to approach it as the passing of hours becomes increasingly vivid. While the sun draws its traces of time, the botanical species pass life cycles significantly slower than the rays of the sun. The city dwellers have their own cycles of inhabiting this space as well: the 9 to 5, Monday to Friday work cycle. The space of the shell is inhabited, with times at different paces from observable motions of sun rays to the unnoticed unfolding of a seedling’s leaves.
Act II
Scene 2
… Restoring the Integrity of the Collapsed
The Big Box has welcomed its tenants to work inside the skin of the former Somerset House. Now steel armatures are set up so that the cubical offices for the technicians and the harnesses for machineries are plugged in place to initiate the second phase of the restoration at the rare façade at Somerset Street.
A typical day:
Early morning, a group of drones fly over the collapsed façade to inspect the conditions of the ruin while the technicians work to coordinate the sequence of the day’s work and sending the codes to operate the 3D printer. At the same time a truck arrives with cartridges of filaments for the 3D printer and then a drone assists to unload and install the cartridges to the 3D printer.
Act II
Scene 3
WELCOMING THE ¼ OFFICE
The robotic team silently dismissed from the space leaving the armature and the empty technician’s cubical standing behind the newly printed façade of Somerset House. A young entrepreneur picking a piece of onion off his 8” greasy pizza sliced into quarters from the pizza shack across the street from Somerset House, staring at the peaking corner of the cubical through the voids on the façade at Somerset Street. There used to be windows, but now just empty openings. Actually it does not look bad at all: as you can observe what is behind the wall through the voids, fantasizing that the wall is a piece of contact sheet that a photographer carefully examines in search for a perfect moment framed and captured. With the roaring noise of trucks, the robotic team returns with parts to assemble into additional cubicles. Among the parts waiting to be assembled, a signage appears attractive to the young entrepreneur, as he wipes the grease off of his fingers ready to throw away the remaining ¼ of his pizza that he could not fit into his stomach. It reads, “The coin operated Cubicle Office: ¼ of a dollar gets you ¼ of an hour and ¼ of an office!”
“Second thought,” a voice in the young man’s mind hovers, “I’ll pack up the remaining ¼ for dinner…”
Next >> Does Architecture Dream of Upheaval? Performance — Act III
