In 1998 the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) approached Asymptote with an intriguing project. Since the NYSE had been developing a strategy for dealing with the ever-increasing complexity of managing their data and information, they asked Asymptote to develop a virtual environment that would facilitate the reading, correlation, and navigation of massive amounts of information.
The NYSE determined that the complexity of real-time information that their staff must contend with on a daily basis required an innovative solution reliant on three-dimensional visualization. As the design for the computer-simulated environment proceeded, it became apparent that there were indeed a number of architectural issues to deal with. Primarily, one had to consider how to navigate through a realm of data. This instigated an approach whereby information is fused with a virtual terrain or landscape using composition, form (tectonics), movement, and the like.

The design of the virtual trading floor (3DTF) began as a reinterpretation and transformation of the existing physical trading environment. The NYSE floor was idealized and refined for eventual virtual deployment. This was accomplished by developing a wireframe model that corresponded to the layout of the "real" trading floor and its constituent elements, their relative placement and geographic location on the floor. The architectural idealization had to provide absolute flexibility; particularly to accommodate the data feeds that would eventually be programmed into it. The modeling also needed to provide for constant shifts in scale, enhanced levels of detail, and the insertion of numerous other kinetic virtual objects. Thus the actual trading floor had to be reconfigured for several reasons: the model had to function in real time, which produced high technological demands; and an economy of form was necessary to process and animate extremely large quantities of data.

Second, the project took full advantage of opportunities in virtual space to manipulate spatial and temporal dimensions. The 3DTF allows one to occupy several virtual spaces, scales, and points of view simultaneously. Captured events can also be instantly replayed alongside real-time events, and the user is able to compress, stretch, distort, or overlap these as required. The importance of the temporal dimension is evident as the inextricable relationship between financial "events" and media news-reporting of cause-and-effect is made transparent. The project posed an interesting opportunity to reconsider the "reality" of the actual trading floor: Asymptote's 3DTF version of the trading floor, although virtual and not intended to be constructed outside of a computer environment, is effectively a direction for possible future trading environments. The virtual trading floor as designed is both a reflection of the existing environment and a provocation for a new, physically augmented architecture.

The scope of objects and assemblies that comprise the virtual trading floor includes two facilities of computer servers and networks, news and data feeds, and almost limitless data-mining capabilities. All of the information that is relevant to the NYSE and its daily activity of trades and transactions is mapped into this fully navigable multi-dimensional world. Although the virtual-reality environment was initially designed to enable the NYSE to supervise their trading environment, the project has recently evolved to cater to other uses, including a large-scale Internet initiative and a television broadcasting environment. These mutations and elaborations of the project have further architectural implications as the virtual realm slowly usurps the real trading floor as a "place." The fact that the general public will soon be able to navigate a virtual trading floor, check stock news and valuations, make trades, and meander about at will, is unprecedented and begs the question, What actually constitutes an architectural experience and presence? And for those who do inhabit and are familiar with the real trading floor, what new insights into their environment can be attained and how might these alter their understanding of what constitutes architecture?

NYSE 3DTF Virtual Reality
Environment
1997-2000
New York, New York

A large-scale, real-time information model exhibiting flows and various data-mapping capabilities for use by the operations team at the NYSE.
The virtual-reality environment allows users to monitor and correlate the stock exchange's daily trading activity and present the information within a fully interactive, multi-dimensional environment.

Software
Alias, Cosmo Worlds VRML, Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Premiere

Hardware
Silicon Graphics 02 and SGI Onyx computers

Client
New York Stock Exchange
Securities Industries Automation Corporation, SIAC

Architects
Hani Rashid and Lise Anne Couture,
Philippe Barman, Sabine Muller,
Jan Loeken, David Serero, Tobias Wallisser, Gemma Koppen, Suzanne Song, Takeshi Okada, Carlos Ballestri Remo Burkhard, Florian Baier, Florian Pfeifer

Programmers
SIAC, Brooklyn, New York
RT-Set, Tel Aviv, Israel

Images courtesy of the New York Stock Exchange

FluxSpace 3.0/ MotionScapes

Installation for Documenta 11

MotionScapes:

Spatial studies based on the tectonics and forms of both physical and virtual movement, speed and flux as pertaining to the contemporary urban condition.

MotionScape Object:

A physical construct in a state of digital augmentation effectively delineating a series of mappings of an abstracted urban condition both ubiquitous and pervasive in contemporary city-space.

MotionScapes embody new architectural formations that are at once familiar as they are strange. These discreet 'architectures' reveal the space of the meander. They are structures that draw upon the convoluted and delirious constructs of media, advertising, branding and desire that circulate through contemporary city space. Places where spatiality is essentially a rarefied urbanism construed of abstract movement, chance mutation and constant transformation.

The new urbanism that surfaces is 'performed' utilizing a plastic-spatial apparatus (architecture) and data streams generated by various readings of 'urban-flux'. This is found data that is manipulated digitally and redeployed to augment the physical state of the apparatus. Viewers (inhabitants) are thereby immersed and contained in the resulting flows and tectonic shifts. Through a process of digital data capture and video redeployment of urban information an immersive environment is formed that evokes a new city construct. Transformed by a mirrored environment the architectural object is experienced as an infinite terrain suspended above ones line of sight. This 'active' surface revisits and extends the polemics put forward in the 1960's by such groups as the Italian group Superstudio with their production of an infinite city or the labyrinthine Situationist City of Constant's New Babylon. Also the influences of projects that proposed infinite domestic territories by such groups as UFO, Archizoom and Archigram. The Documenta XI intervention by Asymptote, FluxSpace 3.0, seeks to map a new rhizometric surface present but invisible in the contemporary urban condition.

The installation in Documneta XI is a continuation of the FluxSpace projects previously enacted by Asymptote at the CCAC in San Francisco, the Venice Biennale 2000 and at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia in 2002.

Carlos Miele

Asymptote is designing the New York flag ship location for the Brazilian
fashion designer Carlos Miele. The store will be located in what used to be
the meat packing district on Manhattan's west side to open in the spring of
2003..

Architects
Hani Rashid + Lise Anne Couture

Noboru Ota, John Cleater, Jill Leckner

Assistants
Mike Huang, Markus Schnierle, Jangwhan Cheon

WTC proposal/ Asymptote

The World Trade Center Towers as envisioned and designed by Minuro
Yamasaki were not only formidable expressions of modernity and
technological triumph, they were also monuments to the limitlessness of
the human spirit. Any new proposal for this site would fall into various
categories, and in effect we could bow to defeat and allow only ghosts
or shadows of the great Towers to remain in the place where they once
stood, or we might take up the challenge again to build with the great
confidence, vision and courage that compelled the original towers. The
Twin Towers were in effect on the 'drawing boards' in the mid sixties
and drew their remarkable influence and inspiration from the advent of
the space age among other aspects of modernity. The World Trade Center
Twin Towers ushered in the communications and information age and now
almost a half century later the world has become a very different
place, as has the human dimension of dreams and aspirations. The new
Twin Twins, as envisioned, are not nostalgic ruminations for what no
longer is, rather they are a continuance and bifurcation of the
formidable Yamasaki Towers into entirely new entities that aspire to
bring equal stature and power to the New York skyline of the
twenty-first century. The Twin Twins at once recall and commemorate the
vastness of what was lost by duplicating and reduplicating the twin
towers former presence. These new architectures are to be constructed of
taught, technologically sophisticated surfaces, skins that express
constant modulation and flux. Large openings in the massive undulating
volumes accommodate sky gardens and large pools suspended high above the
city. These penetrations of nature, light and space infuse the buildings
interiors with air and natural light, while also providing places for
observation, contemplation and meditation. This proposal calls for vital
working buildings for the digital age. Built on the traces of the
elegant giants that preceeded them these are buildings that point the
way to a vibrant and powerful future without resignation or apology.

Hani Rashid
Asymptote New York, January 2002

Credit Line/ Caption
"'Twin Twins by Asymptote/Hani Rashid based on an image by Eduard Hueber"

©copyright archphoto 2002-Asymptote