Global Village Square - GVS - Architectural concept: Paolo Di Caterina, architect - Mediterranean Global Architecture

One of the proposed GVS Architectural concept (Paolo Di Caterina, architect)

reference: THE GLOBAL VILLAGE SQUARE

Concept: The Global Village Square (GVS) is a public service (free of charge) meant to establish permanent links by videoconferencing between Toronto and other cities of the world. It will allow people to meet across land and sea, but as if they were in a common ground.

Project. The plan is to build a Rotunda in Dundas Square at the South-East corner of Yonge and Dundas, across the street from the North end of the Eaton Centre.

At the centre of the Rotunda, a technical equipment housing area (red) supporting eight large Digital Light Processing (DLP) screens (green) facing eight standing areas (yellow) for people looking at the screen to meet their counterparts across the ocean. Each standing area is positioned at the edge of a soundproof zone where people can talk and hear comfortably without being too much disturbed by the seven other zones (transparent in North East position).

Each screen displays the designated GVS spot of a different city in various parts of the world. People looking into Toronto from other cities will see different angles of the open-air space surrounding Dundas Square. The connections will depend on time zones and agreements between Toronto and the other cities. There are already four candidates for connections. A two-way trial connection will first be set up between the Deconism Gallery, 330 Dundas Street, in Toronto and the Galleria Umberto in Naples. The first GVS rotunda will be built in Toronto, and the first permanent connection will be with Milan to celebrate the twinning of the two cities in the summer of 2003. Ultimately, the eight spots should be filled in turn by Naples, Milan, Siena, Paris, Warsaw, Sao Paolo and Seoul, and it is hoped eventually also to serve as an element of Canada’s offering to the World Exhibit of Nagoya in 2005. The Toronto GVS will only be the first of these installations and it is expected to inspire other cities to develop their own nodal centres and permanent connections.

The GVS is dedicated to the memory of Marshall McLuhan and Guglielmo Marconi.

The structure would be placed at the South-West corner of Dundas Square across the Eaton Centre (the canopy runs on a bias from the North-West to North-East corner). It should have a 20-25 meter diameter and the external circular wall should either be transparent or have eight doors opening up widely to the scene outside the structure so that people across the planet could see the city and the activity at each point.

One of the proposed GVS Architectural concept

( Paolo Di Caterina, architect )

reference: THE GLOBAL VILLAGE SQUARE

Architecture of Intelligence:The Invention Of Space (http://architecture.openflows.org/index.pl?section=invention)

Architecture of Intelligence:Principles Of Connected Architecture (http://architecture.openflows.org/index.pl?section=principles)

McLuhan Program in Culture and Technology (http://www.mcluhan.utoronto.ca)

Emigrazioni Mentali, Ermeneutica di Internet e Cosmogonia del Web

Wikipedia:
http://www.ecn.org/wikiartpedia/index.php/De_Kerchove_Derrick