When a College needs to recombinate its campus, when it needs to take its architectural material and recombine it with new needs and desires and circumstances, with new adaptations and mutations of spatial and academic programs, then the existing building species need to evolve in response to these internal or external changes.

To recombinate is to take existing genetic materials and to reconfigure that material with new genetic materials — to mutate it, to evolve it, to co-evolve it — in response to new environmental conditions in the academic environment: new programs, new departments, new fund-raising opportunities, new media.

New programs, new media — as in the case of our first project for the College: their Media Studies Department, given that their training studios, set up in the pre-digital sixties, were forty years out of date. This was not just an equipment upgrade, but a combinant infusion of new information into the very systems of the institution, and thus an evolving of institutional and spatial identity, one that was emerging from the visual world of media itself. And thus, with new media materials and technologies, it was time to recombinate.

Unlike the usual haphazard anonymity of many institutional hallways, the Corridor will provide a sense of arrival and identity, visually and virtually linking the four principal sites of media activity: the Production Studios, the existing Computer Lab, the Smart Classroom, and the Theater. The media works developed in these areas will emerge into the hallway through signage and displays systems (still, video, projective, and interactive media) that present active and interactive interfaces with students and faculty, from within and without the department, as well as with the general public. These frameworks and framings, sampled and scratched, accumulating and dispersing through the facility, decombinate and recombinate departmental and institutional identities.

Thus the corridor is revealed as always an interface, rather than an empty space. Is the typical school corridor dynamic and the adjoining classroom and studios static, or is the corridor such a regular flow as to be static, and the classrooms and studios dynamically filling and empting? What is enacted in this project is a ranging of static and dynamic recombinatory logics. Sample and Scratch is just another form of Recombinant Genetics.

With the next project, for the Open Theatre, our recombinant virus begins to spread across the campus, affecting and infecting the area next to the Media Studies Department with still more multi-media, in this case a new amphitheatre for the Media Department, the Theater Department, and the School of Music, recombinating together departments from around the campus, into what should have been the center gathering of this 1960 building complex, but is current just an empty unused middle, each of the five buildings of the complex having turned their backs away from it.

What we recombinate here, what we sample and scratch, is the existing concrete overhang and institutional glazing of the 60s complex, well as the outdoor landscape wire-seating found around campus. We begin by mutating the internal structure and external covering of the existing canopy, so it can adapt and respond to the covering the stage.

Here we invented a new structural system we call the D’arcies, after D’arcy Thompson, learning from his diagram of combinatory forces within bone. In our canopy tubular structure is accumulated and dispersed, uncombined and recombined, to provide mutual support and bracing, as it gestures out from the stage and up towards the seating, So too the screening structure draws together than expands apart then draws together again as it reaches the stage, recombining and restructuring itself to structure the lighting support.

Having started and then interrupted and then started again on the School of Music, which had begun as our second project for the College and was now our third, our view of this 1990 building had now been recombinated with our experience of the Open Theatre. Suddenly we saw the juxtaposition of circular, angular, and rectilinear geometries of the building not just as the watered down mismash of formal moves from the 70s that it was, but now that we had a tectonic character that could deal with this complicated spatial geometry, we saw it as an opportunity for our character to further develop itself. The evolution of its character would thus be in response to the different (not just spatial but institutional and typological) geometries. Both the bandshell and the balcony canopies, by taking on the color and cadence of the existing atrium window and skylight fenestration, provide the sense of recombinating and being recombined by, mutating and being mutated by, various characters and characteristics of the environment.

Currently when you do venture into the building, you would have to wade through the usual chaotic assortment of vending machines, bulletin boards, mailboxes, telephones, and a makeshift security desk before you could find the location of the School office, all of which will now be reorganized and recombinated by the display network. A particular intensification of the display network is enacted in interactive wall of the Music Library, an active interface recombinating the multi-media activities of the Library, all of which will be brought right to and into the wall: the circulation desk itself, the recent arrivals of books, CDs, and DVDs; the Library’s special collections such as their Renaissance and Baroque instruments (in locked cases that allow for access when needed for performance); and finally, research stations for listening and digital exploration. The Circulation Desk continues the recombination of inside and outside, involutions and exvolutions two-dimensional surface to three-dimensional volume.

Our fourth project for the College started just as a simple incorporation of a fitness center into the existing field house. But when we met with the Director of the Athletics Department, the program instantly recombinated through an inadvertent slip of his when he said “I probably shouldn’t even mention this because I know it’s not in the fund-raising plans, but I’ve always dreaming of having a professional running track. We have some segments of tracks now, but the problem is the building isn’t long enough for a complete loop.” Thus we incorporated the running track and fitness center by de-incorporating what is already in-corporated inside, pulling what is inside to the outside of the building.

The running track will emerge out from and return into the existing gym, the track structure suspending out to establish a new entry. The fitness center will be situated in the front of the building on the ground floor. The live runners will be accompanied by will be combined with, images of a running runner, screened onto the glazing, from the first motion study of running by pioneering scientist Etienne-Jules Marey. This static and dynamic motion will be visible in relation to, in combination with, the dynamic motion of people on the stationary exercise equipment in the fitness center under the running track.

The structural elements of the track expands at the outer edge of the track, gathers as the track turns and goes back into the building, before expanding as it moves into the straight run, echoing the motions of the runners as they move around the track. The structural elements structure the pace of the Marey runner, just as the Marey runner structures the structure, setting the horizontal trace of head, shoulder, waist, and knee. So too the trace of the track lines above will provide the tracks for lighting the entrance below. The accumulation and dispersal of structure and image, recombinating each with the other.

The play of convex and concave that emerged first in the Open Theatre, developed in the School of Music, evolved in the Gym, now mutates again in our fifth project for the main Library on campus, the new and the old media recombinating with the new and the old structure. While there are various exhibition and presentation spaces proximate to the existing Library rotunda, they are unconnected to each other: the Norman and Carole Barham Display Cases on the main (3rd floor) level, the Art Center on the top (6th) floor, and the Presidential Conference area on the 5th floor. These programs and spaces are peripherally visible to each other at best, invisible at worst. Here we recombinate by connecting and relating these various activities to draw forth, in a visual and spatially way, the interactions of the various programmatic species of life within the Library.

The Q Book emerges into the rotunda, pages writ large, celebrating the authors of Queens College, past and present, faculty and alumni. The Queens College Author of the Month will digitally project pages of the College’s authors to all the various levels of the Library. The Q Book is connected not only to the shelves, but back to the Circulation Desk, as the left side of the Book, like the edging of pages, spread out and down and turn to become a trellis over the Desk, leading you, recombinating you, from one to the other.