On July 24 and 25, 1964, Andy Warhol, Jonas Mekas and John Palmer shot six and a half hours of footage of the empire state building as dusk settled over the city and the floodlights atop the tower were switched on and then some time later, off. They shot 11520 feet of film from 8:06 pm to 2:42 am. The raw footage could be unrolled almost ten times the length of the Empire state building itself.

“Empire” the film that was produced from this shoot, slowed the projection of the film from the speed it was shot further, so it became 8:05 long. It is the longest film made by Andy Warhol, although he made other “long films” like “sleep”, a 5-hour film of a man sleeping. Warhol said that cinema was about watching time pass. From the early 1970s, until his death in 1987 his films weren’t accessible to the public, and during this time Empire took on the stature of an oral myth of Warhol’s outrageous persona. It was said to be 10, 12 or even 24 hours long.

It was from this film that I developed an architectural maquette for my thesis project in 2016. The final, larger project on a site on the Lower East Side called for consideration of timber construction, and the maquette brief was to design a viewing pavilion for one of Andy Warhol’s films.

My design responded to Empire as a mirror to the urban landscape. It was a simple cinema, but on the front facade it had another screen: a tile grid that was meant to constantly have its units slowly and continually replaced. a small robotic arm housed in a scaffold-like tower moved on rails across the facade, placing and removing tiles made of an MDF-like pulp, reconstituted from the shavings of previous tiles being shaped by a CNC mill in an annex where the tower would park. The tiles were given depth profiles to look like the various facades of the city, which could be documented by LiDAR scanner. They fit to a grid of spring-actuated clips. Like the serial nature of Andy Warhol’s silkscreen prints and of the images on a filmstrip, the tile grid is meant to be repeatable, and to potentially produce a run of multiples: each unique although occuring in a series or sequence. The circular way that Warhols films are both pictures and dithers of grain, and that his prints are both images and blobs of ink is also reflected in the notion of the tiles being made of a reconstitution of wood: cast from the off-shavings of other castings.

When the sun set the tile grid wall was to be lit from within, with the very thinly carved areas appearing to glow. When each tile was replaced, for a moment the light from inside the billboard sized array would project. Like warhols multiple, they are sort of caught between being like frames of a film and like printing blocks. Inside the theater, the viewing space is like a vacuum tube Television in section, and as a vague viewing space it’s meant to recall lost spaces for cruising and loitering. It’s a place for time to pass 24 hours a day whether or not anyone is watching.