Chipset Island

Silicon Valley's digital escape. 

By providing a place of escape hovering above the density of the Silicon Valley transit hub, travelers and commuters are introduced to environments that bring their awareness to their bodies, consciousness, and present experiences.  At the center of the tech hub of Silicon Valley lies Diridon Station -  a rapidly expanding transit hub serving a local and ever expanding international community.  Based in projections surrounding the High Speed Rail’s rapid development in California, Diridon Station’s projected transit additions including the California High Speed Rail, will increase ridership and visitors.  What do these travelers need most in these densely packed transit spaces?  Places to rest and restore.  By providing an “island” floating above the intertwined train tracks, the public wellness center consisting of a gym, preschool, pool, cafe, gardens, and workspace provides an architecture that cultivates spaces that refocus our attention away from our devices to our bodies, consciousness and community. 

Creating thresholds of interface: digital and physical

Branden Hookway’s 2014 book “Interface” states: “The interface produces a supplementation and augmentation of agency; this is also to say that the interface comes into being as it is actively worked through by its user.  At the same time, by imposing itself as a condition necessary for the expression of human agency, the interface comes to define human agency. The defining is also a kind of subject formation or subjectification, in which human agency is brought into compatibility with the interface. While the functioning of a machine interface is certainly defined in part by the machine with which it interfaces, its essential nature lies in being a threshold condition. What most define the interface are the processes by which it draws together two or more otherwise incompatible entities into a compatibility, within which the operation of the interface, and from this compatibility produces an overall governance or control.”

Using the existing Diridon Station and the proposed transit elements, the drawing depicts existing interfaces and proposes potential interventions giving the traveler or visitor an agency within the transit hub.  The speeds of movement and development charged with joining regions at lightening speeds are now charged with creating the infrastructure that connects people.