A shift

As I mentioned earlier, I will be shifting my gaze from Stalin to a more contemporary evil client.  After some deliberation I’ve decided Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation would make for an interesting discussion on the state of mass media in today’s society.  Newscorp is a behemoth, firmly one of the “Big Six” media companies, and by various metrics the first or second or third largest of the group. Its holdings include, among others, Twentieth Century Fox, Fox News, Fox Broadcasting Company, SKY Media, The New York Post, and Dow Jones & Company, which publishes the Wall Street Journal.  (Info-graphic to come.)

Newscorp currently occupies a portion of the Rockefeller Center complex in midtown Manhattan in one of a series of non-descript International Style buildings on the west side of Sixth Avenue.  Time-Life and McGraw-Hill are among the media corporations housed within this immediate group of buildings, while NBC-Universal is headquartered around the corner at the heart of the Rockefeller Center.  CBS is a few blocks away.

Newscorp was slated to move into a new building in the now stalled/dead Hudson Yards project on Manhattan’s West Side.  It is evident then that there was some desire on their part for a new headquarters in Manhattan, and this would be the starting point for my own proposal.

This topic, I think, is rife with opportunities for meaningful exploration, each of which could become a unique project in its own right.  Some of the opportunies and challenges I anticipate grapling with are:

- The dangers of media concentration/conglomeration to a democratic society

- The very real impact of the internet and citizen journalism on mass media

- The meaning of a media headquarters - what role does it play on a functional/organizational level within the corporate structure, what types of activities take place there, what iconic or symbolic value does/should it have

- The culture and politics of building in New York City.  Informed, active, vocal community boards and interest groups make building anything in this city (particularly anything large or visibly different from its context) an exercise in frustration.  Hyper-density and diversity ensure countless opportunities for political stalemate.

- Does a skyscraper have any symbolic value in a city filled with skyscrapers, or does it purely have value as a piece of real-estate, to be leveraged in hard times (NYTimes)?  If the skyscraper is dead, are there other typologies that can accomodate the needs and desires of a 21st century media company more effectively?

These issues are aside from the more general questions of how you deal with an evil client.  If complicity, irony, and sarcasm are off the table, what options are left? More later.