Above: Aerial view of terraces at Renzo Piano’s renovated Whitney Museum, 2015. The large areas of public patios, with a view towards the Hudson as well as back toward the city, were an inspiration for elevated, public outdoor space.
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THE FOLLOWING MATERIAL will be presented on Tuesday May 24th 2016 at RISD for final critique of an Advanced Studio. The manifesto presented here is one component of a full architectural design project, represented through drawings, models, animations and material studies. Documentation of those materials will be added to this Weebly site following Tuesday's critique. The Critical Urban Theory seminar at Brown enabled me to articulate my concerns with urban public space and urban life in the context of my architecture studio class at RISD. The goal of the latter course was to create a 21st century "People's Palace" - a deliberately ambiguous term meant to draw new attention to public space design. The particular focus was the roof of Manhattan's Port Authority Bus Terminal. My proposal was to advance a subtle adjacency of public park space with full service washrooms intended to serve the needs of the immense homeless population in New York (recently cited at 60,000*). In keeping with the approach proposed in our seminar, instead of addressing a massive and complex issue like homelessness in America's largest city 'head on' or with a claim to a single one-size-fits-all solution, my project proposed a small intervention. Washrooms and park space can productively combine to improve lifestyle and treat water infrastructure at a particular moment in New York's ever expanding urbanization process. I also wanted to acknowledge the real limits of the architectural "solution"; in almost all cases, architecture is too slow to truly address social issues. Very often it contributes to them. How, then, to build? The small scale of this operation constitutes a minor but hopefully catalyzing action. Ideally, this project can respond to the imminent demand of particular populations in New York, and while also sparking discussion about the reality and unmet needs of the city's immense homeless populations. |
The Port Authority in better days, c. 1950. On a recent site visit, the description of "the asshole of the city" was overheard in attribution to the site, though the author previously thought that the Newark Airport had claimed that particular title. Still, the observation makes a good point about urban networks of transportation and circulation.
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Notes
(1) Ryue Nishizawa, A Japanese Constellation, MoMA 2016, 189
(3) David Harvey, “The Right to the City” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 2003.
(4) Poster for “The Fun Palace,” Cedric Price, 1961.
(6) Rem Koolhaas, Delirious New York New York : Monacelli Press, 1994, 88.
*http://www.coalitionforthehomeless.org/basic-facts-about-homelessness-new-york-city/