andrea benavides ward
ARCHITECTURAL + URBAN DESIGNER
introduction This portfolio is a collection of my academic design projects developed during the Master in Science of Architecture and Urban Design in Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation. Throughout these projects, a constant evolution is perceived, based mainly on my personal journey to understand what the built environment means to me and how through design I can contribute by providing the possibility of developing a sustainable future. These collection of projects show my interest in understanding the unique characteristics and particularities of the urban context where architecture will be placed, and how throughout a design strategy the intervention can simultaneously benefit man and nature. This work is just the reflection of all the love, trust and support my family has always placed in me throughout my career. I dedicate this portfolio to them. I am about to jump into a future full of passion, creativity, challenges and, most importantly, architecture. For that, I will be forever grateful.
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content SUMMER SEMESTER Urban Design Studio I [ The 5 Borough Studio ].......................... p3-10 + Stapleton Analysis and On-site Interaction + Staten Island [ Amped ] Ecotones FALL SEMESTER Urban Design Studio II [ Spatial Justice Studio ]................... p11-30 + Cha(nging)ttanooga + Poughkeepsie Stories + Baskets&Beats + Ecological Youth Empowerment + Cannabis Archaeology SPRING SEMESTER Urban Design Studio III [ Water Urbanism Studio ].................... p31-62 + Amman the “Water Monster” + Contemporary Qanat + 21st Century Qanat
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summer semester URBAN DESIGN STUDIO I The 5 Borough Studio is guided by three ambitions: to nature a design process specific to existing urban environments; to critically consider site and program; and to interrogate the role of Urban Design as serving the public as a client. Using New York city as a laboratory, we explored methods of defining and representing urban sites and its multi-scalar systems.
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stapleton
analysis + on-site interaction
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CITY |Stapleton BOROUGH |Staten Island TEAM |Paul Xiaopu Wang and Lavin Zhao Research project plus on-site interaction in Stapleton in order to understand the existing conditions of the neighborhood and analyze how outside factors and multi-scalar systems are composing the current behavior of the community. Throughout the investigation we overlaid the layers of vacancy, crime rates, public spaces, recreational activities and transportation in order to find interesting correlations between each other.
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staten island
[amped] ecotones
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CITY |Stapleton BOROUGH |Staten Island TEAM |Paul Xiaopu Wang, Dissa Pidanti Biodiversity is one of the core identities of Staten Island. Yet this element is missing in Stapleton. This project re-imagines new ways of integrating wildlife into human settlement. The prototypes at three selected sites serve as guidelines for future wildlife and human co-dwelling urbanism in multiple scales.
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Staten Island [amped] ecotones is a project where human settlement is not achieved through sacrifice of wildlife inhabitat and addresses resiliency through a design response for flood risk conditions
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fall semester URBAN DESIGN STUDIO II The studio is an interdisciplinary project. Our work grows from the multi-scalar relationships between design and the lived and built environment, from community concerns to infrastructural planning, from public policy and economics to nature of public space. At all stages, research and design engage with the multiple and often conflicting voices and communities. We learned how to design for equity, spatial justice and regional currents. “All who are oppressed, subjugated, or economically exploited are to some degree suffering from the effects of unjust geographies, and this struggle over geography can be used to build greater crosscutting unity and solidarity.� Edward W. Soja: Seeking Spatial Justice 12|
cha(nging)ttanooga
water|production|ecology|recreation CITY |Chattanooga TEAM |Carmelo Ignaccolo, Deniz Onder, Dissa Pidanti Cities are not autonomous. They rely on networks of interconnected systems: infrastructural, economic, environmental, political, social, and many others. The complexity of these networks is tied to hierarchies of historical and ongoing decisions made across geographies and scales. This research project consisted in examine a particular American city and region whose functioning is tied to their natural or manmade boundaries and conditions. The territory was analyzed through selected and assigned systems which enable the region to operate and change. How do urban and regional systems interact, overlap, and co-produce spatial and social conditions?
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poughkeepsie stories generation of change
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CITY |Poughkeepsie TEAM |Nishchal Agarwal, Zarith Pineda, Kristen Reardon This assignment consisted in putting together several layers of research throughout the lens of an specific topic that each group selected. Our group decided too focus in the young generations from Poughkeepsie. We called them the Generation of Change. We went to the site and develop several interviews with kids who attended the Partnership Center After-school Programs and we decided to represent all the data collected by telling Darrian’s story, one of the kids we were lucky to meet. We chose this particular way of representation because we decided that our audience were going to be all the children from the community, so we experimented with this graphical representation method that could relate to them, be easy to understand and do not feel external.
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basket & beats
on-site community interaction
CITY |Poughkeepsie TEAM |Nishchal Agarwal, Zarith Pineda, Kristen Reardon We design an on-site interaction with the purpose to engage with the young population in Poughkeepsie. We made an analysis of the activities kids and young adults like to do in their free tie during the weekends in order to find the best way to get their attention and make them participate with us and tell us their stories. We created Baskets&Beats, an event where they could play basket ball, listen to good music and have pizza for lunch. In exchange they gave us the opportunity to learn from them and understand the reality in which they are living. We gave them the platform to communicate their concerns and wishes of having a better city to live in.
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ecological
youth empowerment
CITY |Poughkeepsie TEAM |Nishchal Agarwal, Zarith Pineda, Kristen Reardon The ecological youth empowerment approach uses Poughkeepsie’s existing resources to intervene and disrupt the city’s current cycle of poverty and crime. By providing safe, simulating centers for the city’s youth, we hope to fill in a vacuum for an extremely under-served and at-risk community. These programs will be finances and made possible by New York State’s Compassionate Care Act, which has legalized medicinal marijuana manufacturing and dispensing for the chronically or terminally ill. We estimate that manufacturing throughout our sites and programs around the city would contribute a &68 million industry to Poughkeepsie. This renevenue would greatly help the city’s deficit and fiscal crisis, as well as fund urban infrastructure improvements, like safe corridors and green streets. Due to the nature of the manufacturing program, safety considerations are required around its sites. We hope to leverage the requirements to also provide safe buffers around our interventions, which combined with facilitated accessibility and walkability, will end up providing nodes of safety for the city’s youth. |19
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cannabis archaeology
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CITY |Poughkeepsie TEAM |Nishchal Agarwal, Zarith Pineda, Kristen Reardon Cannabis Archaeology seeks to counteract the lack of economic drivers and jobs in the city of Poughkeepsie. By leveraging unused water infrastructure and the legalization of medicinal marijuana in New York State, we are introducing hydroponics cannabis manufacturing. Through the production of this lucrative crop, we aim to ameliorate water quality, social pride and health. The Compassionate Care Act legalized the use of medicinal marijuana in the State of New York and created an opportunity for a new industry and regional connection among counties. This has the opportunity to help the city of Poughkeepsie, which is struggling from a high city deficit, high poverty rates and a failing education system. The city was once a thriving industrial city that depended on the Fall Kill Creek as an energy source. Nowadays the city has expanded and became victim of urban renewal that left spatial and social injustice scars on the city. The once productive Fall Kill is now an unused polluted waterway suffering from the contamination from various communities within its watershed. By establishing medicinal marijuana grow houses along the creek, the city can leverage a lucrative water dependent industry to provide economic benefit, while purifying the creek. Uncovering the past golden age of Poughkeepsie can help strengthen the social pride of the city and re-activate the creek to provide educational and recreational opportunities.
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spring semester URBAN DESIGN STUDIO III The main focus of the final semester of the program is Water Urbanism. The studio takes on problems of global urbanization, extending previous work on variously-scaled physical and social infrastructures, programmatic interventions and community partnerships. The chosen countries to developed the studio this year were Jordan and India. I visit Jordan at the beginning of the year and we develop our studio project focusing in the existing ecological, social and financial situation in the country and how it reflects itself in the water system within the different contexts in Jordan. In this semester we combine the knowledge acquired along the year focusing in ecological justice, sustainability and resiliency.
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amman
‘the water monster’
CITY |Amman TEAM |Isabel Carrasco, Gabriela Friorentino, Zarith Pineda, Haochen Yang Amman “The Water Monster” was a hypothesis stated by our group after developing a detail analysis of the city of Amman and its behavior within Jordan. We established a strong dependency in outside sources, importing food, energy and most importantly water. Amman is actually consuming more than the 80% of drinking water in the country, causing several type of damages to the environment and to the community. Throughout this research assignment we analyzed the layers of dependency and revealed the city’s history to understand its actual morphology and situation.
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contemporary qanat recharging jordan
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CITY |Amman TEAM |Sreyash Dasgupta, Vrinda Sharma and Jiaqi Sun Due to the fact that the existing water system in Jordan is failing, we want to replace it by introducing a new resilient and integrated social urban infrastructure by reinterpreting the Qanats traditional system. In order to prove the flexibility of our proposal we are working in three different contexts, urban, desert and edge. The system incorporates rainwater collection, gray water reuse, groundwater recharge, water purification and public space activations. The new infrastructure will strengthen itself throughout phases and will build a new water life cycle in Jordan.
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The proposal is composed by a combination of several water harvesting techniques. It incorporates rainwater collection, gray water reuse, natural purification system and groundwater recharge. The growth of this new system will be parallel to the decline of the existing water infrastructure, aiming to achieve water independence in different areas around the country in the next 50 years. The system is flexible enough to adapt to the different contexts within Jordan, we chose to work in three different environments: urban, desert and edge. Due to the fact that the project is proposed in phases, we are designing a duality of complementary programs that will address other social and cultural issues in the areas of intervention.
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Ras Al Ein Park is in an strategic location in between a traditional gathering space for the local people, The Friday Market, and the new Cultural Center of Amman. The park is in between two highways and it is facing a strong disconnection from the neighborhoods across the highways. This disconnection is mainly generated by a lack of access to the area and to the lack of identity from the citizens in relation to the large scale spaces and buildings adjacent to the park. The proposal incorporates the idea of design underground activated connections in order to reactivate the park and locate the Qanat in order to reach the underground water level. 44|
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21st century qanat
recharging downtown amman
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CITY |Amman TEAM |Sreyash Dasgupta, Vrinda Sharma and Jiaqi Sun 21st Century Qanat proposes a combination of decentralized sustainable water harvesting systems by reinterpreting the Qanat System—a traditional water distribution technology employed by the Romans in the region in the 6th Century, which connected, channeled and distributed the underground water through agricultural areas into cities. The current water infrastructure in Jordan consists of large scale infrastructures causing ecological, social and economic harm to both the countryside and urban agglomerations, like Amman. These near obsolete infrastructures are mainly pumping drinking water to Amman from across borders. Consequently, the water supply infrastructure, such as pumping stations, artificial dams, canals, and waste water treatment facilities are being controlled by centralized, high energy consumption entities that are not in sync with the ecological struggles that Jordan is facing related to the lack of water access.
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To test our hypothesis, we chose Amman, the biggest urban agglomeration within Jordan. By taking advantage of its natural geography and cultural traditions of the area, the project aims to transform Downtown Amman into a permeable, water autonomous city by 2050. As the main strategy the project proposes to decentralize As Samra Treatment Plant by breaking up the treatment process into five stages of filtration and introduce them into the urban fabric. The design of each stage of purification will respond to the scale of the urban context where the interventions will be located and to the characteristics of the existing communities. This new network of water distribution and purification will work together with a combination of underground and on the ground systems.
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community waterbank 2nd stage of ďŹ ltration
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The first stage of purification of the newly introduced network begins within the community itself. The community collects the gray water from their own neighborhood via a fleet of bikes that have been sponsored by the Ministry of Transportation and the Arab Bank, to transfer the water from strategically located bike stations to WaterBanks, where they will unload the water. This would not only generate the first step of gray water filtration but also provide a much needed mode of public transportation, which has already been studied in Amman. The WaterBanks are located within a distance of one kilometer from each bike station. Each WaterBank is equipped with a reed bed filtration system providing the second stage of water purification within the network. This is where the water is first injected into the ground. Throughout the use of the bikes and shared public transport networks, the people will trade the water collected in exchange of water credits, which will allow them to increase the amount of drinking water received in a week, reducing the dependency on trucks, who are currently distributing drinking water as the supply provided by the municipality is not sufficient. The main objective of the WaterBanks is to function as an inverse model of a gas station, instead of extracting from the ground we are proposing to recharge it by injecting water in it. In Each WaterBank functions as a community space, funded and developed by existing community institutions, like schools and mosques located in the near vicinity. This space is of flexible usage. It could function as public library, a performing platform or storage facilities if needed.
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qanat al husseini mosque 4th stage of ďŹ ltration
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The third stage of water purification, revolves around underground reservoirs. They are strategically located at the lowest point of the city’s topography. These underground reservoirs, also known as community abnars, will collect all the water coming from every WaterBank within the residential neighborhoods in the hills. The water will be filtrated by implementing UV Ray technique of filtration, using solar energy to harness electricity. At this point, the water will be purified to the level of the underground water. Once the abnars are filled up, the water will be released to the next purification level within the network. The Qanats presents the fourth stage of the purification network. The Qanats are located within the valley of downtown Amman, following the footprint of the ancient sale that flowed across the city. The starting point of the Qanat´s system will be on top of an existing underground natural spring in Ras Al Ein Park and will flow towards the east, passing in front of the most important religious, social, and political gathering space in the city, the Al Hussein Mosque. This intervention will be funded and developed by large institutions, such as Al Hussein Mosque, by applying the charitable endowment established by the Islamic Law. This could also be combined with support from the Ministry of Transportation and the Amman Great Municipality. The Qanat is the infrastructure within the proposed network that reaches the water table and introduces the groundwater into our water harvesting strategy.
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Our design is based in understanding the ground elevation, the movement of water and its relationship with people’s behavior and performance within the community. Throughout a combination of several scalar operations, like adding a new layer of transportation, renewable energy production and much needed social infrastructures, the project consists in collecting, filtrating and distributing waste water, rain water and street waste water run offs by re-conceptualizing the ground.
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[JUNE 2016 - MAY 2017]
andrea benavides ward
master in science of architecture and urban design G S A P P, C O L U M B I A U N I V E R S I T Y I N N E W Y O R K