Control functions within the memory of discipline. Discipline is a physical employment of boundary and rigidity. Control manipulates and randomly disperses / dissociates identity and desire. The Headless Cathedral proposes a critique of architecture as a rigid organization of program and the ideals of economy and efficiency. Architecture traditionally practices discipline in the physical erection of boundary, limits and rigid structures. In response, our project affirms waste and excess as fundamental cultural values. Standard architecture is disciplinary. It seeks to rationalize and organize human life. In response, we propose the ideal of control embodied in an invisible soft infrastructure that seeks to create a place of overlapping fields of desire. 

The headless cathedral, seeks to create the conditions for multiple authors to write and produce their own program. It seeks to enable and encourage the invention of program in the context of a busy urban location long identified with business-mindedness and singularity of purpose. As a structure without organs bounded by a single skin, it seeks to create a diversely-formed yet still unified space for bacchanal. Much as capitalism invents new desires fulfilled by new products, it aims to create opportunity for interaction and accelerates chance or unpredictable encounters.

The headless cathedral is a terminal for seven subway lines that all bleed past the “limits” of the site. Lifting the building’s second floor more than 60 ft off the ground and providing for “drips” of the program below grade, extends the limits of influence while allowing for increased interaction in transit by foot or train. It is a porous conduit, pulling away layers of its volume in order to provide an interface with areas of directed or undirected activity. It strives to be an interrogator, making vulnerable parts of the building to viewing, but also the individuals looking and being displayed. The circulation is also not fixed or typical, in that long ramps rise from the ground to provide access to all programs simultaneously, while still allowing for directed movement to desired areas in the structure by means of elevator or stair. An overlapping and intertwining programmatic structure is the result, providing simultaneity of influence and desire through the folding of spaces into themselves. The skin acts as a permeable boundary between exterior and interior spaces, accentuating the fluidity of the senses and idealizing the anthropomorphic qualities that are comparable to the human form.

Excess is paradoxically manifested in an architecture that embraces control as a principle of design. Today, New York City exhibits the rapid increase of control through its subtraction of formerly public space The headless cathedral is a reaction to the evolving urban condition by realizing the excessive logic of capital as the rationalization of the irrational, the making productive of the unproductive and the wasteful, the creation of waste that is excluded from its economic formulas.