SPEAK EASY: A PLATFORM FOR HYPERLOCAL STORIES

As people gather around a campfire, crowd around a soapbox, or log onto online forums, the act of storytelling creates public space in its simplest form. Stories often take the form of myths, legends, oral histories, and quotidian anecdotes, all of which carry the lived experiences of a community. Our research looks at case studies of places vanishing by virtue of displacement (e.g. Borneo, Tuvalu), resulting in a loss of communities, and with them, their stories. Storytelling can be a social form of collective entertainment, but in this context can also be a critical means of preserving the experiences of ethnic diaspora and soon-to-be lost places. In addressing the erasure of these stories and celebrating the joy of storytelling in public space, this project asks how can architecture function as a platform for both voice and media? How can the voices of hyperlocal communities be amplified through an architecture dedicated to the programmatic agenda of telling stories? Storytelling has been formalized into various art forms and architectural typologies like the library, theater, museum, or immersive installation, but there are few purpose-built pieces of architecture for the kind of storytelling that creates conversation-based publics. Although our project is not in competition with existing paradigms of storytelling, we believe there is something powerful in physically interacting with other people’s stories in space. We propose a new architectural typology that facilitates the telling of stories through novel and multisensorial mediums. The convergence of video and image projection, sound, and haptic layers within architectural space materializes a new atmospheric dimension of stories. Through a city-wide network, the proposed typology - the Speak Easy - injects spaces for storytelling into the urban fabric as an alternative public amenity. The Speak Easy operates at the neighborhood scale, sited in Little Manila, Woodside, Queens. Through this new typology, we aim to create a vibrant place of discourse and discovery of common threads, stories, and other people.