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AFTER US, “MAHALLE”
UGLY FUNKY
ONE PAGERS DRAFTING something like art
After Us, time continues to move forward.
This project seeks to investigate the schism between design and decay. Rather than fighting against the passage of time and redeveloping the pre-existing Red Hook Grain Terminal, located in Red Hook, New York, We propose to build not with it but through it, embracing the Red Hook Grain Terminal’s journey towards material decay. We consider the Red Hook Grain Terminal not as being unoccupied but rather as being in a state of transition from building to landscape.
The figure ground dichotomy historically expressed in Noli Maps differentiates publicly accessible and inaccessible spaces. The interior of a public building is expressed as a continuation of the ground drawn in white, while built structures are black figures on the white ground. However, when it comes to abandoned buildings, such as Teatro dei Satiri, the existing occupied ruins are shaded in a darker raster pattern, while the footprint of the original theater is completed in an outline. Abandonment transforms the building into a continuation of the landscape.. In these terms, we perceive abandoned architecture as a part of the ground, enabling us to build through the structure rather than repurposing it. We call this new stage of abandonment “figureless ground”.
After us, what we have built will decay.
Acting as a metering of this landscape’s decay as it erodes over an immense passage of time, it becomes an Earthwork. The term Earthwork refers to art that incorporates natural materials to shape the land itself. Our project is an earthwork, not because of its use of natural material but its exhibition of material’s natural decay. The observation of decay is part of the way we preserve it’s memory.
We are viewing the Red Hook Grain Terminal through the lens of experimental preservation in the sense that their decay is part of their nature. The existing infrastructure of the Red Hook Grain Terminal, when stripped of its rusting ancillary metal structures, consists of 53 concrete cylindrical towers linked together with a network of internal walls. Completed within the span of only 13 days, and functioning from that point for only about 40 years - the silos have been in disuse for around 60 years and this year is its hundredth birthday. Decay, we propose, is integral to their relationship to time, as it is an object intersecting it.
Rather than being considered as loss, the erosion of the silos becomes a compounding of meaning and evidence of a prior state of being. Projected into the future, the silos will be eaten away by their own site and removed from their original form, again and again through cycles affecting the integrity of the concrete such as freezing and thawing through the years. The metering of decay over time takes place in relation to the superimposition of a secondary, duplicate structure. In our conception of building not with, but through, our imposed structure is a formal echo of the cylindrical silos. The storage capability of the building was designed to accommodate high-bulk grain when the Red Hook Grain Terminal was a functioning grain storage facility. The inserted archive echoes this program in relation to how material is stored. Similar to how grain was loaded and then kept in the silos, people and objects travel in the same manner. Entering by boat from a single silo that touches the water, visitors are brought up to the lifted walkway and are able to enter any one of the 50 archival silos by a descending platform located in each archive.
After Us, what will be remembered?
Using an archive as a programmatic gesture towards storage, our superimposed structure holds, essentially, a time capsule. The contents of the archive are sourced from a lottery system, akin to something like Jury Duty, letting New Yorkers who are selected submit an object of their choice for preservation in the silos as a civic duty. Each silo is slowly filled and capped starting in 2022 and then, every other year leading up to the sealing of the entire structure at the hundredth year in 3022. At that point, access is limited until the water rises to a certain point of accessibility through a different, higher entrance
that matches the raised water level hundreds of years after the archives have been sealed. Ashes of loved ones or a soda can or a surgical mask ,or a polaroid of two architecture students all scattered in the shelves of the silos awaiting curious eyes interested in the New York of yesteryear.
After Us, what we have built on this Earth remains longafter we have passed.
Through our research we have become increasingly inclined to think about the way we act as stewards over what has already been built. Our research has brought us to think about architecture and its use over a longer period of time rather than as something that is built now for now.
As we extend our conception of the temporal framework of architecture to include a future in which we --meaning our generation--no longer exist, we think about what will happen beyond ourselves through the built environment. By deciding not to redevelop an abandoned building but to build through it, we have been both constrained and enabled to not stand against decay, abandonment, and death but to embrace these and to design from them and toward them as necessary to a more complete picture of human life and the role of architecture in it.
After Us, time goes on
The approach to the silos is something to behold. Two ships sail through the foggy night towards the brightly lit structure almost hovery in the distance.
Underneath the silos, where the concrete has fallen away is a dense system of scaffolding that travelers are enamoured with. The steel suggestion of industry that once was providing a playground of interaction.
Inside of the silo, covere with glass, one feels lost in a, what seems to be, an endless dense mesh. It seems as if the silos used to house the archive streches into every direction.
Seeing the city from the top of the archives of the city. Skysrappers sank in the ocean, still striking and tall yet seems like they were executed.
“neighborhood,” “quarter,” “ward,” “district.”
Mahalle is located where the private domain of family life and the public world converge. Mahalle solidarity is used to carry out significant community-level management tasks, such as religious rituals, life-cycle rites, resource management, conflict resolution, and similar activities.
