Archives For competition

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Restoring Infrastructure With Interaction

Gowanus Canal from the BQEMayor Cory Booker said it well: “from the Transcontinental Railroad to the Hoover Dam, to the dredging of our ports and building of our most historic bridges – our American ancestors prioritized growth and investment in our nation’s infrastructure.” Throughout history the image of new infrastructure has been synonymous with progress. The need for newer, larger and faster services brings the perception of an advancing society. The perception of progress and political tenure have proven to go hand in hand, so we seem to be able to find money to finance large infrastructural additions.

But when we look around at our infrastructural landscape, most often it is not progressing, but languishing. This is partly because fixing old infrastructural systems is not nearly as glamorous as building ones. Whether its the systems that move water, power, waste or people, the neglect of these essential systems has left them decayed, at times to a point requiring wholesale replacement. There have been designs that reuse dilapidated infrastructure for something new, but what if part of the problem is not just that systems are old, but that their relationship to the public encourages their neglect? Continue Reading…

Infrastructural 
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Is Greenland the Next Dubai?

Despite the fact that everyone knows where it is on a map, Greenland has spent much of modern history as an unimposing world destination dotted with sparse habitation amidst hundreds of thousands of square miles of ice. Mining, fishing and hunting have comprised most of the large island’s small economy for centuries. Only recently has the image of Greenland’s future started to change as hopes of increased natural resource extraction made possible by a warming climate lend the possibility of a new importance in the global marketplace. Will a rush of business ultimately create a flourishing ice kingdom to the Northern Hemisphere or merely another example of corporate tenacity shoehorning industry into an environment that is among the planet’s least hospitable for human civilization? Continue Reading…

Architectural 
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American Infrastructure: The Next Generation

Waste Transfer Renovation RenderingA New Life Proposed for a NYC Waste Transfer Station

As efficiency and new societal demands force the evolution of our infrastructural landscape we are consistently constructing new means to service our culture with its fundamental needs. In addition to energy and new virgin resources, the victims of this course of natural selection are often the preceding installations that have lived out their usefulness. The route of demolition and wholesale replacement may have a certain degree of ease when it comes to the planning process, but it creates a missed opportunity in not realizing and capitalizing on the latent energy and lifecycle costs of our existing, retired utilities.

Dubbed “Harlem Harvest”, this theoretical project was charged with exploring a new life for an existing waste transfer station in New York City. The design combines a new bike storage facility, a new kindergarten school and a vertical farming greenhouse, garnished by new floating community garden plots lining the coast. As our proficiency with mixed-use buildings develops we are becoming more aware that the ecology of programs (architect for “uses”) integrated together in a building is just as important as the series of systems needed to make the building function. Continue Reading…

Infrastructural 
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When Cities and Wetlands Collide

The integration of natural flora and fauna into the cities has been a challenge for architects and planners since the beginning of buildings. The task becomes even more difficult when the urban spaces in question are part of our country’s neglected, post-industrial landscape. The winning entry to the recent Gowanus Lowline Competition explores the process of mending broken pieces of aged, urban fabric while dealing with not only the vacancies created by absent industry, but sites riddled with the environmental scars of a previous era.

The scheme probes at the possibility of new urban spaces, utilizing both natural systems of remediation and the active density of a modern city. Wetlands and cityscape: two realities commonly assumed to be so diametrically opposed that their overlap is all but implausible. The former harnesses natural processes to provide an ecology with no net waste or squandered resources and supports a myriad of species in close proximity. The latter is the function of fabricated infrastructural systems that levy an indisputable tax on natural resources as it bleeds energy to support a single species in close proximity. The prospective benefits of synthesizing the accolades of both environments are far-reaching, but given their respective needs of space and circulation the question becomes, how can these ecologies co-exist without one decimating the function of the other? Continue Reading…

Urban Planning