Overall, the artists take a more celebratory, playful approach than the architects. Paola Pivi proposes a happy happening of 800 or more people standing together in the atrium “making one big hug”. Joris Laarman Studio’s proposal, “Paper Starlings,” is a fleet of hundreds of tiny radio-controlled paper airplanes that fill the atrium with a “gracious organic ballet”. Architects, perhaps unsurprisingly, take more challenging and belittling positions toward the structure and its architecture. Many, like Peter Marino, fill the space with thoughtless, scaleless forms, giant three-dimensional doodles. Some don’t even suggest the existing space at all in their renderings, as if they can silence the architecture by ignoring it.
     A good number of the proposals attempt to green the space, a timely strategy that seems just what the airless, windowless, white space might need. Some projects are quite literal, bringing trees and gardens into the atrium. Saunders Architecture envisions a forest landscape with Frank Lloyd Wright roaming about inside. Hariri and Hariri offers a solution, “Outside-Inside”, that drapes the interior of the rotunda with vertical cardboard fins, stamped with images of lush greenery. Other proposals turn the entire space into a green market and a fish farm. While well-intentioned, these proposals are more symbolic than actual, emphasizing the appearance of natural elements rather than their physical properties.
     A handful of entries explore more deeply what an ecologically-shaped space could be. Giancarlo Mazzanti Arquitectos propose lining the central space with a permeable membrane and programming it with heat, humidity, air pressure, light, and sound to create “changing atmospheres”, synthetic clouds, gardens, bodies of water, and ice formations for visitors to pass through.