Greenboro

Greenboro – a place
to watch the ebb and flow
of people waiting to go.

As they mill about
however they will,
standing in place until –

Their vessel arrives
so they may flow,
nearing or departing Greenboro.

When I first arrived at Greenboro station, I began to look for moments of transition within the site. I focused my attention on the moving aspects of the station, to better go along with the temporary aspect of my project. I immediately noticed the pendulum-like coming and going of the O-Train, the flow of people through the site, and various moments of collection; passengers waiting for their bus or train, buses parked off to the side of the transitway, shopping carts collecting next to a curb … but most fascinating, I found a circular vent (pictured below).

As with all circular portals, this vent had markings left at its lowest point from water runoff collecting over time and leaving an imprint on the concrete below it. But what I found so interesting was that there must have been a fire of some sort within the room, as there was markings from smoke on the concrete above the vent. By the very nature of the shape of this vent, it created these polar moments of collection around its form. It then became very apparent that circular motifs were used as decoration all over Greenboro station, acting as a device for collection – or as storage, as we shall see later.

I began to focus on one moment at Greenboro: the O-Train platform at the west end, where this pendulum-like motion of the train recurred every fifteen minutes. I found it fascinating how passengers gathered on either side of the doors as people would exit the train; once the train was empty, the people on the platform would enter the train to continue on their way. I wanted to find some way to illustrate this interesting social mechanic in a handheld, cyclical model. I needed to present the movement of people from one space, through a narrow point of collection, and into another space – while other people waited patiently just outside. As a starting off point, I used the form of an hourglass as my model, and eventually derived this form through much investigation and experimentation:

As you tilted this sealed box back and forth, glass beads inside would roll in between the extruded form to mimic the motion of passengers on the O-Train at Greenboro station. I was thrilled that I was able to capture this transitional moment in my model, and now sought out a place in the architecture building that exhibited the same movement of people.

I was able to discover this same pattern outside of Room 204; students would wait for the previous class to finish and wait in and around the door, then students leaving the class would weave in between them to head off in whichever direction they were going, and then the waiting students would enter the now empty classroom – perfect!

With my installation, I was heavily influenced by the existing site; the movement of people, existing conditions of the area around the front door, and the obstacles located on the ceiling (where I intended to suspend my installation walls). I created cardboard “beams” from which I strung lengths of yarn at various lengths to create barriers; yet these barriers did not block sight lines nor did it interfere with the traffic of students passing through, as it merely reflected the existing flow of people through the site, now making it clear the area of collection that I intended for use.

Having successfully learned about the passage of people and creation of momentary spaces of privacy within a public realm, I began to take on the challenge of creating a place of temporary storage for our friend who roamed the OC Transpo system. I wanted to focus again on the flow of people to influence the forms that I used for this pavilion, but by allowing the passage of people near my pavilion, I needed to devise a way to allow for a place of storage – without erecting solid walls and a locked door (that’s just cheating!).

I was influenced by the design of a matchbox: it is not immediately apparent how to open the box, but a knowledge that pressing one side of the “drawer” makes it easy to open the box and access what is inside. I thought this would be an interesting method to stow away our fellow’s belongings in such a high-traffic space. I created a tri-level module of drawers that would store various objects for our hobo: the lowest, and largest drawer, would hold things such as a pillow, blanket, or whatever else he needed on a daily basis; the middle and mid-sized drawers would hold items such as food or clothing, allowing for a cyclical passing through the drawers so that he may always pull out clothes that he hasn’t worn in a while, or the oldest food he has (so it won’t go bad); and the small, high drawers would hold his transfers and scraps of paper, upon which he would scribble on for various ideas that had him “stumped” – he would place the paper in the box and let it sit out of his reach so that he could think it over, at the same time revealing a new piece of paper that he stashed away some time ago, to revisit his idea and try to perfect it.

These cardboard drawers (so that they were easy to make, recyclable, durable, et cetera) would be housed in a box-like structure decorated with an abstract mosaic, as found on the site. These forms made use of circular cuts and extrusions, to mimic the circular motifs on the site and allow for the passage of people, now that these forms intruded on the space in which people would walk through. The drawers also influenced the movement of people through the site, as they stretched from one form to another, they would temporarily block off the passage of people moving through – this created a dynamic, transformable structure that served a purpose for our hobo, created a moving mosaic for passers-by, and reflected (and at times deflected) the flow of people through Greenboro.