Traffic
Traffic was the winning project in a 1981 competition organized by the ReVisions program of the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies, founded by architect Peter Eisenman with the support of Philip Johnson in 1967. The competition — juried by historian Joan Ockman alongside architects Christian Hubert and Deborah Berke — was prompted by the impending demolition of the New York Coliseum, on the west side of Columbus Circle, site of the present-day Deutsche Bank Center (formerly Time Warner Center). The competition received many proposals to rebuild the landmark circle as a Baroque pedestrian piazza, reflecting the Eurocentric and historicist tastes of architectural postmodernism. By contrast, Traffic accepted the contemporary function of the urban circle as a vehicular thoroughfare. The project proposed unifying the disparate traffic islands with a material indigenous to the site: standard international orange traffic cones arranged in a perfect grid. Though the project was conceived as a thought experiment, the competition organizers invited the winning proposal to be realized on-site.
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