Help! We're trapped inside an electronic billboard, hostages to a design concept. We're not part of the advertisement, per se. It's actually much worse than that. A group of us are part of a grand experiment in architectural branding. The idea was to locate the world's most prestigious media company at the very crossroads of American popular culture: Times Square. Ground zero, if you will. So last June, after almost 30 years of relative civility at 350 Madison Avenue (the House that Alexander Liberman Built), the editors and writers and art directors of Condé Nast moved to new offices at 4 Times Square.

It's certainly an impressive-sounding address, one you know the corporate bigwigs thought would absolutely reek with cool. But the building was hexed from the start, its construction marred by mishap and disaster. The building's design includes an eight-story cylinder that projects out from the corner of 43rd Street and Broadway. This is where the publishing powers-that-be decided to place five magazine art departments. Visual people, the thinking went, need what? Visual stimulation.

Those of us relegated to this turret call it "The Can." It's the twenty-first-century equivalent of being sent to the tower. Initially our small, pie-shaped offices, with just a few narrow windows, managed to be both dark and noisy at the same time. Out-side jackhammers pounded, traffic screeched, and every afternoon at 2, dozens of groupies shrieked on cue for the MTV cameras across the street.

But that was nothing. Just Times Square culture shock: Prada elbowing its way between hip-hop and polyester. In the fall, work began on the now-famous "Nasdaq Market" sign. If you watch the financial-news shows on TV, you've probably seen shots of it. It's that extremely busy electronic billboard with stock prices scrolling across the side of a building. I work inside that. Look closely and you'll see small, portal-type windows located be-tween and around the flashing images. What you probably won't see are art directors looking out the window, soaking in the view.

Before Nasdaq could operate the sign, they first had to construct a steel skeleton over us. It was like sheathing The Can in a huge iron lung. Originally the sign was supposed to jut out just 18 inches from the building, the depth of the actual sign, but Nasdaq decided to install catwalks on each floor between our windows and the inside of the sign. Condé Nast lawyers failed in their attempts to block it, so the steel shell and catwalks went in around us.

Soon afterward the electricians arrived and be-gan installing miles of black circuitry, as the light and the sky and even the chaos of Times Square grew more distant. During the wiring, my colleagues started taping "Please Be Quiet" signs, facing out, to the windows. They were ignored. So we pulled down all the shades in The Can. Work continued. That damned sign had to be ready for the millennium celebration. We were probably the only offices in town rooting for the Y2K bug. They did complete the sign in time for its scheduled debut. Unfortunately, the dreaded computer virus was a dud, leaving us stuck inside a functioning sign.

So what's it like? Even though we're suspended above one of the busiest intersections in the world, it's like being in a submarine. A weird, dystopian U-boat designed by Fritz Lang on antidepressants. Due to that four-foot recess, we can't see outside unless we stand directly in front of the windows, which recently were outfitted with black velvet curtains to hide the circuitry (a very Condé Nast touch).

There's not much to see. The glass building across the street acts as a mirror. During the day stock prices fly through the air and then bounce right back to us, in reverse. At night five-story blobs of red and green and blue reflect back into the office. Logos float, twist, twirl, and turn various shades of the video rainbow before morphing into new and equally meaningless images. It's like living inside a lava lamp: enough to give you a headache, if you actually bothered to watch it. No one in the office does. Of course all this could be worse, I suppose. We might be stuck in the offices in the building directly across from us. Now that would be torture.