'Christo and Jeanne-Claude: The Gates and Unrealized Projects for New York City'
The Gates, 20 Years Later
All photographs by John Hill/World-Architects, unless noted otherwise
Christo and Jeanne-Claude: The Gates and Unrealized Projects for New York City is a new exhibition that opened at The Shed on February 12. The celebration of the 20th anniversary of Christo and Jeanne-Claude's installation of 7,503 saffron-colored gates in Central Park also features an augmented reality experience where The Gates once stood. World-Architects visited the exhibition and tried out the AR experience.
Open since February 12, Christo and Jeanne-Claude: The Gates and Unrealized Projects for New York City is on display until March 23 — or 39 days: 24 days longer than The Gates was in Central Park. Some sources indicate that more than 4 million people experience The Gates during its two-week display in February 2005, but if, like this writer, that number did not include you, then the Shed exhibition and its companion augmented reality component are welcome winter diversions. The exhibition at The Shed displays preliminary sketches for the installation, photographs of the completed work, pieces of the actual gates, and other artifacts that orient visitors to the large-scale undertaking. The “unrealized projects” in the title of the exhibition consist of models for Christo and Jeanne-Claude's proposals to wrap Marcel Breuer's Whitney Museum of American Art and other familiar buildings in the city. The AR experience, powered by Bloomberg Connects and developed by Dirt Empire and Superbright, allows anyone with an iPhone to virtually experience a portion of The Gates in Central Park. Photographs and commentary from our visit to the exhibition at The Shed and the AR experience in Central Park are below.
At The Shed
The political and bureaucratic process was as important to Christo and Jeanne-Claude as their artistic process, so in addition to sketches and photographs, the exhibition also includes film footage of the artists trying to get their self-financed installation built after its inception in 1979 — more 26 years and three mayoral administrations before it was installed.
Dirt Empire, the design and production studio responsible for the AR experience, also developed an interactive tabletop map that enables visitors to explore the full extent of The Gates in Central Park. (Photo courtesy of The Shed)
A three-dimensional model of a portion of Central Park — specifically, the Harlem Meer at the northeast corner of the park, at Fifth Avenue and 110th Street — occupies a portion of the space in the middle of the large gallery.
With brown grass and trees without leaves, the model replicates the winter scene of the original installation and helps visitors see how a few of the 7,503 gates were laid out along the paths.
Garnering the most attention in the middle of the gallery is a full-scale gate being lifted into place.
The display is accompanied by numbers related to the installation, including the fact 25 variations in gate widths were used, from 5'-6" to 18' (1.6m to 5.5m), “depending on the width of walkways.”
By showing the gate in the midst of being lifted, the curators reveal how the posts were connected to the bases that, importantly, allowed The Gates to occupy the park without disturbing it physically, without having to be anchored to the ground.
Nearby is a display of the bolts, plates, and other pieces needed for the post assembly.
In Central Park
Visitors can find the augmented reality experience at the entrance to Central Park at 72nd Street and Fifth Avenue, where they scan a QR code on a pylon, download and configure the Bloomberg Connects app, and then follow the “gates” and signage to additional pylons further in the park.
The AR experience uses the iPhone's camera, GPS, and 3D graphics to overlay the virtual unfurled gates within the park. Occasionally, like with the off-center gates here, the three parts did not meld perfectly.
The environmental effects of the virtual The Gates are stunning, especially when the saffron gates are viewed against the sun.
While the AR software is processing environmental data in real-time, that data does not include cloud cover, so the virtual sun may shine through a gate even when the real sun is behind a cloud.
Not shown here, the AR experience also includes pop-up hotspots that allow users to tap and look at preliminary sketches, photographs, and other artifacts from the original installation.
The complexity of the AR software extends to occlusion, which is meant to ensure that people appear in front of or behind the virtual gates; as seen here, some occlusion glitches occurred.
The short path of the AR experience goes past the iconic Bethesda Fountain and ends at Cherry Hill, a fountain circled by a couple dozen gates. Here, one can see how The Gates would have appeared today, against a skyline much different than 2005.
