NYC INFORMATION CENTER
810 7th Avenue
Tel: 212-484-1222
Designer: WXY Architecture and Local Projects

For tourists who aren’t quite ready to abandon their guidebooks for the GPS maps on a cell phone, there is a happy compromise: NYC&Co’s sleek new information center near Times Square “is an architectural manifestation of Google,” according to Kevin Booth, the marketing organization’s CFO. The architecture firm WXY and media designers at Local Projects collaborated on the new storefront, which features a series of interactive media tables and digital projectors shaped as the letter “i” and visible from the street to draw in visitors. The base of the projector changes color according to the category that the user at each station has selected, “museums and galleries” or “dining,” for example. Through an interface that looks much like a giant iPhone, visitors can use a coded interactive disk (or “puck”) to get maps and directions, restaurant listings, museum schedules, and other information, which they can easily email, text, or print out. According to Claire Weisz, principal of WXY, “The idea was to create a prototype of a new way of experiencing the information, so the biggest challenge was coordination and inventing, and creating new things on the go.”