In a follow up to the Left-to-Die Boat report that Situ worked on last year with collaborators Charles Heller and Lorenzo Pezzani (part of Forensic Architecture – a project funded by the European Research Council) that focused on the reconstruction of the events that lead to the death of 63 migrants in March/April 2011, a press conference was held today to present new evidence and announce a new legal cases that are finally being brought to court in Spain and France. After the Paris Prosecutor’s Office ignored initial complaints in April of 2012, two survivors filed the case as civil parties, forcing open a judicial investigation as to why French and Spanish military ships criminally neglected a vessel in distress, ultimately resulting in the unnecessary deaths of 63 people at sea.

The above image shows new Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) data describing ships over 50 meters in length on the morning of April 4th 2011. Highlighted area indicates migrant vessel’s range of locations on that day. Below is the addendum itself that was released at today’s press conference in Paris held by International Federation of Human Rights (FIDH).

Experts Report Life to Die Boat

At the press conference, Lorenzo Pezzani describes the inclusion of the new vessel detection data that is has been incorporated to strengthen the report’s spatio-temporal reconstruction of the events analyzed in the report. His description can be viewed at 30:00 of the below video.

Video streaming by Ustream

The addition of new SAR (synthetic aperture radar) data from the morning of April 4th 2011, the crucial time when a military ship is thought to have crossed within 10 meters the migrant vessel (see image at top of page), has been instrumental in gaining further insight into the provenience of the military ship the survivors recall encountering. While this new data narrows down the possibilites, the question remains – which ships were present in the area, informed of the vessel’s distress and failed to respond? Read FIDH’s most recent coverage of the report here.

Over the weekend we installed Heartwalk at its summer home on Rockaway Beach. In celebration of the move, the Design Trust for Public Space will be hosting a Public Space Potluck for NYCxDesign in collaboration with the MoMA PS1 VW Dome 2. Please join us May 18th, from 1-4 pm, for the informal potluck and a discussion of the role of design in disaster recovery. Design Trust for Public Space will be providing cups, plates, napkins and beach blankets. The full press release is available here.

Heartwalk will be installed in the Rockaways through June 15th

Installing Heartwalk at its new home in the Rockaways at the end of Beach 94th st.

A big THANK YOU! to NYC Parks and Design Trust for Public Space for helping us get Heartwalk here.

Heartwalk will find a new home for the summer season. Now that it is completing its stint in our home neighborhood of DUMBO, Heartwalk is getting ready to move to the Rockaways. The piece will be installed near the beach, where the boardwalk existed before it was decimated by Hurricane Sandy in October 2012.

The New York City Department of Parks and Recreation is facilitating the move from DUMBO to Rockaway beach. We’re excited that Heartwalk will be present as the Rockaway community continues to rebuild and attract visitors this summer.

Heartwalk  has moved to DUMBO and is installed in the Pearl Street Triangle, just next to the Manhattan Bridge Archway, through April 30th.  Big thanks to the Design Trust for Public Space for helping to find new home for Heartwalk and for connecting us to the DUMBO Improvement District and the New York City Department of Transportation, who facilitated the move in early March.  After Heartwalk leaves DUMBO, we have plans to move it to another venue for the summer.  We hope to announce the next location shortly.

As documented in the above time-lapse, the shadow of the Manhattan Bridge creates a spectacular light show on sunny days.

Also, the Heartwalk Instagram aggregator site is still up and running.  Click here to check out the latest pictures (www.heartwalkdumbo.com), and be sure to visit and tag your own photos #Heartwalk.

We were honored to have a visit from Architects Wang Shu and wife/partner Lu Wenyu recently.

We’ve been wrapping up the design development phase of Design Lab, a project we are working on for the New York Hall of Science. Over the coming weeks we’ll be developing 1:1 scale prototypes of various components of the structures and, in the spirit of the Design Lab project, we’re looking forward to getting our hands dirty!

Here’s the latest version of what we’ve been calling this one the “Sandbox.” It will be a space where visitors can experiment in a variety of media at a large scale. Pictured here, make a structure out of rubber bands and dowels!

The “Fort” structure will be a combination of thin shell concrete modules and wooden planar elements that will simultaneously serve as storage for the myriad materials that will be used for maker projects as well as vessels for the display of objects/experiments made by visitors.

We’ll be posting images of mock-ups soon!

Valentine’s Day was pretty intense in Duffy Square this year as tens of thousands of visitors passed through to renew vows, canoodle and visit the “heart” of New York City.

Photo by Keith Sirchio

Couples and families filed in to heartwalk throughout the evening. It really began to function like a photo booth.

In a very unexpected surprise Heartwalk  also became the stage for at least four engagements that evening.

Photo by Keith Sirchio

It was our hope that this heart would be a net that could ensnare the incredible diversity that is Times Square. Witnessing the range of visitors that stopped to have their picture taken that evening was pretty remarkable.

Approximately 500,000 people pass through Times Square each day. Inevitably, many of those people are going to take photographs of their experience and as part of the planning around the Heartwalk project we began to think about how we could crowd-source imagery from photos taken by the general public. We worked with a terrific office called HD MADE to build a Heartwalk photo aggregator that harvests Instagram images at regular intervals throughout the day. HD MADE created a platform that harvests images by predetermined hashtags (#heartwalktsq, #heartwalk) and feeds them to a gallery.

If you visit Heartwalk, Instagram a few pics and hashtag them #heartwalktsq. Check out your photos (and everyone else’s) here: www.heartwalktsq.com

Hopefully over the coming weeks this gallery will grow as the public visits the installation. We’re looking forward to seeing the results of this experiment in social media – somewhere between a photo-booth and a photo-album.

One component of the Design Lab at the New York Hall of Science – the “Dollhouse” – will be used for hand-scale projects, such as making models of buildings and cities. The perimeter of the space is composed of shelving for both display and materials storage. A continuous horizontal surface called the “aggregator” will provide space for kids to display what they have made and to build on the ideas of other participants. In response to the program’s emphasis on craft and making by hand, the structure of the dollhouse will be based on traditional timber construction. For both the walls and ceiling, wood framing will be laid out in a triangulated tessellation pattern and joined with connectors that are integral to the plywood cladding. To allow passers-by to see in, some parts of the perimeter are left open, and some parts of the cladding are perforated. The perforations echo the tessellated geometry of the framing.

The Aggregator

Front View of the Dollhouse

Plan of the Dollhouse

We’re in the throes of assembling the components for the Heartwalk. After removing all the hardware and planing the planks, we’ve been cutting them to size for assembly into the array that will form the inner and outer walls. The structure will be pre-assembled into sections that we will transport and install in Times Square over approximately 12 hours.

A view of the south-side being mocked up.

A view from between the interior and exterior walls.

Note all the holes from where original boardwalk screws were removed.

Over the past week we’ve collected close to 500 salvaged boardwalk boards from four locations (Atlantic City, Sea Girt, Long Beach, Rockaway) along the NY/NJ coasts that were hit by Hurricane Sandy for our Times Square installation, Heartwalk.  Boards are a mix of exotic Ipe, treated Pine and Cedar, and composite decking.  In some locations we’ve picked boards out of piles of debris.  At other locations we were given permission to unscrew boards from sections of boardwalk that were deemed unsafe and would need to be rebuilt.

Once back in our fabrication shop, repurposing begins by removing nails and screws and brushing sand and salt off of the boards.  Splintered sections are cut away and the remaining clean portions are stacked and dried.  A number of the Ipe boards that will be used on the interior of the heart are planed on one side to expose the natural dense reddish grain that is masked by the weathered gray patina.

Simultaneously, we have been developing the design through mockups and lighting studies.  Over the next week, we’ll be fully fabricating Heartwalk at a staging location adjacent to our fabrication shop prior to installing in Times Square on February 10^th.