Artists Space

Architecture & Design Project Series:
Timeline: A Retroactive Master Plan for Silicon Valley

March 31 – May 12, 2001

Project Space

Timeline: A Retroactive Master Plan for Silicon Valley is a multimedia installation recording Silicon Valley's architectural and urbanistic future by twisting time's arrow back onto itself, and forward again.

Opening Reception
Saturday, March 31, 6 - 8pm

Within the network of routes, intersections, and nodes that have arisen in Silicon Valley over the past half-century has emerged a flickering constellation of corporate campuses – vast office parks collapsed into a bright, entropic uniformity that marks a horizon for contemporary architectural speculation. In Silicon Valley, the city has already been replaced with the network, in all ways imaginable.

A network-city for 20,000 consumer-worker-inhabitants is currently planned at the edge of this region – Cisco Systems needs space. Timeline borrows this project and executes it according to different rules, converting it into the basis for a master plan that forces Silicon Valley to recycle itself, to turn in on itself rather than continue to spread.

Kadambari Baxi is an architect and a media designer, and a founding principal of imageMachine, an expanded architecture and media practice. She holds degrees from the Interactive Telecommunications Program, NYU; the School of Art & Design, Pratt Institute; and the School of Architecture, CEPT, Ahmedabad, India. She is an Associate Professor of Professional Practice at the Barnard and Columbia Colleges Architecture Department. She serves on the boards of The Architectural League, and Van Alen Institute.


Reinhold Martin is an architect and Associate Professor of Architecture at Columbia University, where he directs the Temple Hoyne Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture, and the Ph.D. program in Architecture. He holds a PhD from Princeton University, as well as degrees from the Architectural Association and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. A founding co-editor of the journal Grey Room, he is the author of The Organizational Complex: Architecture, Media, and Corporate Space (MIT Press, 2003).