Contact Forces proposes curated moments of social friction to augment interaction between the government and the public it serves. A new city hall building in New Orleans functions as a site to test a more transparent model of civic architecture. Social friction is created through intersection ”as overlapping, nesting, and lodging” in three areas of the project. First, the mayoral, councilor, and departmental offices overlap with restaurants and cafes. Second, the council chamber is nested within the public art gallery / exhibition space. Finally, a series of public hearing halls are lodged within the document's library. These moments of friction, designed in section, sit in contrast to normative offices that act as the corridor-less medium, throughways by which everything is accessed. This project is represented as a complete world with many crossing narratives. The project is represented by a single longitudinal section consisting of a series of spatially continuous but temporally ambiguous moments. In the original presentation, these scenes were tracked vertically through the building, shifting between the three primary moments of transprogramming achieved via intersection.
