SUBNATURE
Carmel, NYC Watershed Carla Lores | Michael Yarinsky
New York City’s Watershed is a site in crisis. Not only is there a larger demand for water due to the growth of the population, but due to further suburban development in upland areas, water catchment sites are not as hygienic as once thought. Within the Croton Watershed lies Carmel. This suburban town in Putnam County has large basins for water catchment integrated into a developed suburban community. The distributed system currently in place for the dispersal of sewage, though, has a very high risk of contaminating the watershed.
Based on a topological study using sand and cavities to represent the density and area of groundwater contamination risk, a landscape was generated. The areas that are highest upland have the highest ground water capacity and lowest contamination risk, and the areas downland have the lowest capacity and highest risk. This relationship is key to the remediation strategy, by creating a topography that channels e uent water to these specific sites. The exo-landscape is then populated with components that not only allow the material flow relationship but can also be modulated to allow for varying lighting conditions and the ability to contain soil and plants. This passive system is then activated by integrated pumps that draw sewage to biogas processing sites.
Using pastoral ideas native to the development of suburban landscaping, such as the sweeping vista, winding pathway, scenic overlook and grotto, we develop the landscape to be a desirable recreation site. Overlaid, layers of sewage, air, and water flow create a new material ecology within Carmel. Since the sites of highest contamination risk are protected, New York City’s Watershed is more protected than previously. Because the system is automated to deposit and process waste into the sites of highest capacity, the system as a whole has a larger capacity for sewage.
This project hopes to blur the boundary between what is considered clean and contaminated, synthetic and natural, and in doing so foster a modified suburban desire. This, through the intensification of existing conditions of a synthetic pastoral and the gizmo begins to challenge the boundaries that enabled the development of suburbia in the first place.
Excursions on Volume
New York City Erik Martinez | Shawn Sims
The modern shipping container is analogous with these standardized practices, both physical and protocological, and in an effort to increase globalization, this mechanism generates an opportunity for the insertion of a hack. Perhaps with an excursion into understanding the ability for weight and volume to be an operable energy, the container field of a port becomes an untapped resource able to generate new land.
Currently the dredged materials form the Hudson River are carried out into the ocean and dumped because of their toxic attributes. However the toxicity levels are dropping and for the first time since an industrialized New York, the sediment collected from dredging operations has the potential to remain in the city and be utilized in this land forming process.
The use of weight as a latent energy, and of dregde as a material are combined to reconsider the arrival of infrastructure to a once industrialized Hudson river. The fluctuating weight of container traffic is utilized to rigidify dregde to create a pixelated landscape which emerges from the existing water level. The commercial materials utilized within this infrastructure provide an emerging architecture with the products necessary to begin a series of retail and market spaces. A porous pixelated landscape rigidified by a membrane is stretched vertically to enclose space and change continuously as the market fluctuates in size.
Prophylactic Landscape
New York City Edwin Lam | Sean Stevenson
Within the current discourse of public health, airborne viruses capable of surviving transcontinental travel have prompted widespread efforts to fortify local and global boundaries against the flow of disease. Despite the current strategies for managing disease by eliminating infected animals and quarantining infected people, efforts to halt the flow of contagions have been frustrated by the difficulty of visually representing the virus.
While images of slaughtered animals, face-masks, and decontamination procedures at airports have filled the media coverage of these epidemics, the impossibility of pinpointing the precise location of the virus has created an ever present paranoia within public spaces. The project then focuses on this emergence of paranoia within the public sphere and a reconceptualization of a synthetic terrain to manage the paranoia.
Infusing clinics within city parks, the proposed synthetic terrain consists of the three key programs within a mass prophylaxis campaign: diagnosis, distribution, and treatment. Each clinical program is then masked with a series of temporal park amenities. As the city fluctuates through different levels of contamination the park amenities recess, allowing the embedded clinic to emerge as the predominant landscape.
Ruin Nation
New York City Mike House | Victor Orriola
Conditions of urban decay and abandonment are beginning to spread through New York City at a rate not seen since the 1970s. 2008 was the first year on record that the DOB kept records of stalled construction sites and high foreclosure rates began to affect the city’s most vulnerable neighborhoods. As a result 15,000 renters who never engaged in irresponsible mortgage financing have come to account for at least half of the cities foreclosure victims. Simultaneously the NYC Dept. of Homeless Services together with the NYC Housing Authority have been advocating for an approach which stresses permanent housing over the typical transitional shelter model as a long term remedy for transitional housing.
We perceive the NYCHA’s call for a new type of transitional housing model as an indication that city agencies are now willing to be more progressive in the way that transitional populations are handled and understood. With that in mind we thought it appropriate to investigate some illicit practices which tend to thrive off of the decay and dysfunction of the city’s built environment. Specifically the work done by metal scrappers and squatters has become a model for our re-invigoration of abandoned sites. Through mapping we have identified how seemingly disparate sites are actually part of a sophisticated and highly interconnected underground network with it’s own rules for economy, occupation, growth and decay. While doing so we have been able to formalize some seemingly mundane qualities that such practices might use to evaluate any given vacant site and adopt these practices into a formal housing and community infrastructure.
Beyond simply a housing intervention, we propose various degrees of enclosure which create concrete benefits for mainstream real estate speculators as well as social service providers. These disparate entities rarely engage productively with one another as their fundamental operations tend to be opposed. In Ruin Nation gentrified and frontier populations will support each other through an engagement with various local architectural operations.
Prescriptive Urbanism
New York City Rebecca Caillouet | Roxanne Sadeghpour
Regulatory policies are often conceived as the primary focus of criticism that is rooted in governmental deficiencies or market failure. Narrowly defined, regulation is set forth through a series of local administrative controls that deliberately preserve previous social and political climates by embedding them into the urban fabric with the intention of managing the form of the city. To this end, the problem lies not with regulation, in and of itself, but with the preserved tracts of the city that are carried through time and forced to exist in climates to which they cannot adapt. These tracts, or residual enclaves, are the physical manifestations of this form of regulation in the built environment, and serve as the primary focus of inquiry into the regulatory network.
Through an improved understanding of the effects of the enclave on the local community, a higher degree of community sustainability can be achieved that addresses municipal economic, environmental and community actions that extend beyond land use and planning. New sustainable regulatory protocols must be informed by past experience as well as a new understanding of human behavior, societal needs, and the limits of regulatory capabilities. The nature of these regulatory initiatives must be posited in a way that constructs and nurtures the residual enclaves as dynamic and robust, and functions in concert with the evolving social and political climates that it currently exists in. At this level, pieces of the past are moving simultaneously with current climates creating a situation that is limiting progress as it pertains to efficient sustainable regulation.
This project seeks to address the effects of the residual enclave by acquiring a new methodology and systems of intelligence to negotiate antiquated modes of regulation. In its current form, the enclave has become a stable fixture within the city and positions the inscribed communities to search for loopholes or illicit means to manage them. These illicit means behave as counterprotocol to the regulatory network and challenge the fundamental elements of its origin.
Mystery Market
New York City Ashkahn Bazl
This project deals with the redistribution and reinterpretation of storage throughout the urban context of Manhattan in locations that involve the idea of bringing storage to a site of distribution. The site featured is Union Square, chosen for several reasons, ranging from the fluxuation of traffic (pedestrian and consumable) to the permanence of pop-up structures that the site hosts. The geometries were formed by using a square footage ratio of existing storage components, ranging from personal locker sized spaces all the way to room sized spaces, and potential building footprint. Since the site was demolished, the park had to be relocated, in the vertical. From the spacial breakdown of density in the vertical comes another system of structural members that support the park as it moves through the site, there is a constant shift in majority between the park and storage programs as one moves upward through the building. The program of storage also is reinterpreted as mechanisms are designed to instead store trees for the park instead of belongings for a person.
Synergism By Recreation
New York City Zakiya Franklin | Peechaya Mekasuvanroj
The nature of our research entails social interaction and a means of stimulating it within a zone that lacks locations that do so. The category of activities that we test against are those that relate to leisure. In this sense, leisure is acknowledge as activities that take place when not engaged within work. Leisure is chosen to progress with because it provides a universal common grounds in which people of all cultural and social groups can openly interact. Areas that claim to provide locations for free and easy social exchange actually restrict the level of satisfaction one would receive due to rigid program. When it comes to quantifying the level of satisfaction, studies have shown that people receive a higher level of satisfaction with more informal programs. By introducing water and energy into the infrastructure, for gathering and social interactions, we increase the potential number of visitors, where different networks of people of groups can interact.
By this continuous intersection of social groups, the extent of potential users increase. In addition to creating an infrastructure that enhancing social interactions, it also connects the different zones within the site, zones that produce a separation between one another. The series of paths that create this linear network of circulation along with the informal programs of social articulation, bring residents and non residents to a mutual location that promotes interactions, in an attempt to blend the boundaries that have developed over time. Being that this infrastructure is one of the new areas within the city to induce such an effect, it becomes a mechanism to lure people to this part of the city, thus making it more popular.
Los Angeles: Pre-Final
Los Angeles Jun Pak | Cole Reynolds
The project explores the opportunity in developing an infrastructural system that is analogous to the growth logic of the city. In so doing, the infrastructure system augments the unique micro urban characteristics of the city as it currently exists. This is done through the implementation of several micro municipal infrastructural devices that allow for an immediate affect on the city. These devices, which in their quantitative and qualitative deployment offer diverse and unique social protocols that currently do not exist.
Mumbai: Pre-Final
Mumbai Allison Hoffman | John Seward
Our thesis posits a reflexive assembly system developed as an incrementally built structural framework and integrated component system. The normative framework enhances the structural integrity of informal settlements and allows for self-guided spatial transformation, both horizontally and vertically, of the local environment while also harnessing the extreme appropriation characteristics found within such urban contexts. The embedded components augment the capacity of informal settlements to collect their own resources in a massively distributed fashion and utilizing the fundamental cooperative strategies already employed, share them communally for the benefit of all involved. Operating globally as a continually reconfigurable framework constituted by these simple yet intelligent parts, the systems local growths and alterations over time result in new global organizations that, through their spatial form, begin to expose the social organization and individual agenda which is traditionally invisible in more formal architecture. The overall form of the framework is always in flux and never predetermined, however, it is guided at all times by purpose and necessity, and the flexibility of human cognition.
New York City: Pre-Final
New York City Bradley Rothenberg | Joanna Cheung
An early example of the scaffold deployed on site in an interior circulation scenario, vs. a vacant space bridging scenario. There is a notion to give back vacant space to the public, and adding redundant circulation to increase accessibility to these newly civic spaces.
Recent Work: Jakarta
Recent Development of my project: I am currently working on getting differing reactions from the system based on different parameters, the road as one type the street as another, and perhaps the overpass as a third.
Mumbai: Midterm
Mumbai Allison Hoffman | John Seward
Our thesis project is an autonomously guided, incrementally developed resource manipulation infrastructure focused on water, space, and the materials needed to continue growing the system. Operating spatially and socially, this framework generates self-transformation of informal settlements like slums over time, promoting self-agency in existing urban contexts. The thesis at large explores issues of design-by-architect -vs- autonomous-design, the synthesis of top-down coherence and bottom-up flexibility, and challenging the way urban areas currently exist by retuning the balance of power through control of resources.
New York City: Midterm
New York City Bradley Rothenberg | Joanna Cheung
Currently our research is focused into the materiality of the civic scaffold system, and at what scale flexibility operates at – We’ll post video from our model’s asap – until then, be sure to check out our midterm presentation.
Flexible Scaffold : Octahedra unit from Bradley Rothenberg on Vimeo.
Jakarta: Midterm
Jakarta Anna Perelman
This thesis agenda is to design a lightweight frame work that becomes the interface for Jakarta’s informal job market of both street vendors and drivers of informal vehicles that allows for emergent spaces near the congested infrastructure of the TransJakarta Busway. The extreme commuter is also a key player and their benefit is not directly visible but they have a new coordinated delay network that rearranges and allows them several path options as well as opportunites to accelerate exchange on their own terms.
NYC Update
We want to share the latest in our explorations into the logic’s of Civic Space, Event, and Interface – And Scaffold Generation.
Example of the Scaffold, as a Pure Scaffold, no interface device’s yet.
Jakarta: Research Final
Jakarta Anna Perelman | Chad Reid Mathias
Within Jakarta the extreme commuter exists in transit for the major part of the day. Within this scope we can introduce opportunities of weaving moments of exchange and transfer that allow for commuters to tap into moments of formal as well as informal markets, information kiosks, as well as job opportunities. Essentially there are two main characters and everyone in between. One is that of the official user who, as it is now, does not inform the infrastrucuture but can. And the other is the person who arrives when densities at intersections occur. Their interaction is the premises for a new architectural space where the initiated corespondents can define the space for that use at that time. Within a rigid framework there are situations that can flow in and out with flexibility that responds to user capacity and need.
In the image the commute is unrolled through a series of images and the time/speed is shown vertically (the longer the commute the lower the dip), as well as time the main two user types are compared by the black and the red lines. The goal is that they each catalyze each other because there is a response to one another. The main commuter triggers the spread of formal organizational programs.
