Boundaries of Interaction

Natali Ovalles

The current site [ Madison Park and Lake Merritt Bart Station ] is characterized by emptiness, lack of city interaction and visibility. The physical boundaries constrains the accessibility to the area creating a blank space in the center of the block separating the rights of the space to serve as connector with the temporal and spatial context from the rights of the citizen of appropriate this public space. But does that emptiness have a size? limits? boundaries? What about if the current situation is inverted? What now is an empty center is fulfill and the physical constrains of the border became empty margins that create a sense of welcoming for the surrounding community .

Emptiness is a complex spatial phenomena which boundaries are not always physically defined but that are charge with social multiplicity. The intention is amplify the zone of contact by creating a dynamic emptiness that expands and contracts in which there is no arbitrary lines of movement that the visitors are expected to follow but instead a place that change over time, altered by the use. The project should work as a dynamic pulse of the city, a place of opportunity, a propagation space, a connection between things that are not necessarily compatible, as a meeting space, a familiar sense.