I grew up in a family of designers, builders and critical thinkers. From a young age my parents taught me the beauty of problem solving and hard work. My constant exposure to this world left me with an innate desire to create on my own.
ART & ARCHITECTURE AND A GAS STATION
SUMMER STUDIO DAN WOOD
CONCEPT + SITE REVISITING THE 1968 GYM FALL STUDIO BERNARD TSCHUMI
ARCHITECTONICS OF MUSIC
SPRING STUDIO STEVEN HOLL
ART, & ARCHITECTURE... AND A GAS STATION
DAN WOOD SUMMER STUDIO
INTRODUCTION This studio looked at architecture through the lens of contemporary art - both as a means to discover new concepts and forms and as a critique of architecture itself. The studio worked alongside James Wines, one of the best examples of an artist-architect practicing today to advise us in our search. James has also enlisted his colleagues Vito Acconci and Gaetano Pesce to join us for discussions during the semester. The project was gas station – intentionally banal, intriguingly open to re-imagination and currently an extremely needed facility in New York City. ART & ARCHITECTURE It used to be that artists were architects and architects were artists. Making was making, and artists like Bernini had no problems alternating between the two forms – or even occasionally creating works that were something in-between. With the advent of increased specialization, the establishment of the profession of architecture and the rise of new forms of art this relationship has become less and less common. However, there is a longstanding alternate history of architects who have worked in a manner more akin to art production, utilizing architecture as a means of self-expression or as a critique of the traditional confines of the discipline. …AND A GAS STATION “Forcing yourself to use restricted means is the sort of restraint that liberates invention. It obliges you to make a kind of progress that you can’t even imagine in advance.” - Picasso James Wines has said that he prefers to work on projects that are completely beneath the radar in terms of architectural discourse – the big box retail store, the fast food restaurant, the parking lot – and use the fact that almost no one has truly thought about these structures as a jumping-off point for his radical creations. Together with James we came up with the idea of using the gas station as the project for this studio. New York City is running out of gas stations. Two of the last downtown gas stations closed last year on Houston Street, leaving only a single station south of 23rd Street. With the advent of electric vehicles and driverless cars, gas stations are also changing – not to mention all of the economic, political, and environmental baggage that the oil industry carries with it. We will combine the gas station with other programmatic elements, such as parking, a car wash and public space, imagining that this will be city run and operated in order to counter market forces which are the primary reason for the downtown gas stations’ demise.
EAST HOUSTON Sandwiched between the East Village & The Lower East Side, East Houston is one of the most dense and culturally rich neighborhoods in all of New York City. This area was the mecca of Art and Music in New York, and its influence left and impact on a global scale, changing the Art world forever. DIVERSE. Immigration played a major role in the development of the neighborhood, mixing many different cultures within a Relatively small proximity, diversifying the area drastically. LOW INCOME. Labeled as ‘skid-row’, the LES brought harsh life to its inhabitants. Poverty was at a peak in the area, which made influenced apartment squating, rampid drug use, crime, and unemployment.
CONTEXT & CULTURE “Squating is the antidote to forced removal, a means of community self-defense as well as a means, through use of abandoned spaces, to meet the neccessity of a home, and build solidarity and power on the grass roots.”
“The Lower East Side was a crucible for creativity. Artists and intellectuals were drawn here because the could afford to live a create here. When Lou Reed moved here from brooklyn in the ‘60s, he rented an apartment on Ludlow Street for something like $38 a month. Now it’d be $3,000. I don’t think there’ll be any more Lou Reeds on Ludlow Street. All of the geniuses who were here because of the cheap rents are gone.”
On the Lower East Side of the 1950s and 1960s, gangs such as the Puerto Rican Dragons, African-American Sportsmen, and the Irish, Jewish, and Italian Mayrose regularly engaged in turf battles for control over certain sections of the neighborhood.
ARTISTS. REBELS. REJECTS.
Juvenile delinquency, gangs and heroin usage became trademarks of the Lower East Side. Parks become battle grounds between competing groups.
CBGC was a New York City music club opened in 1973 by Hilly Kristal in Manhattan’s East Village. The club was previously a biker bar and before that was a dive bar. The letters CBGB were for Country, BlueGrass, and Blues, soon became a famed venue of punk rock and new wave bands like the Ramones, Television, Patti Smith Group, Blondie, and the Talking Heads.
In 1973, author Norman Mailer teamed with Photographer Jon Naar to produce ‘The Faith of Graffitti,’ a fearless exploration of the birth of the Street-Art movement in New York City. The book coupled Mailer’s essay on the origins and importance of graffitti in modern urban culture with Naar’s radiant, arresting photographs of the young graffitti writer’s work. The result was a powerful, impressionistic account of the artistic ferment on the streets of a troubled and changing city - and an iconic documentary record of a critical body of work now largely lost due to history.
THE NEIGHBORHOOD
THE SITE
PRECEDENT STUDY
William L. Pereira & Associates, Gin Wong, 1965 - Union 76 station Beverly Hills, CA
Tramway Gas Station Albert Frey 1965 - Palm Springs, CA
By referencing the iconic the Gas Station, the primary architectural elements - Canopy, Collumns, and Gas Pumps can be exagerated and manipulated in new ways. New possibilies for program, public interaction, and signage can be explored, providing new opportunities for a modern Gas Station - specifically in an urban city context.
PHYSICAL MODEL
The model is cut along the southern lease line, exposing a new linear underground organization - making the Gas Station experience an efficient system while connecting the below grade with the street through a unique facade expression. Which not only provides a pleasant aesthetic, but also performs functionally by allowing natural light to penetrate to the level below. By placing the Gas Station below ground, it increases the performance and functionality of the station by increasing the amount of gas pumps on the site. Better controls spils and odors, and provides shelter from weather. Which also frees up the ground level providing new opportunities for public program and neighborhood connectivity.
REVISTING THE 1968 GYM BERNARD TSCHUMI FALL STUDIO INTRODUCTION In 1968, strikes, the occupation of university buildings, and hundreds of arrests at Columbia University all began with an architectural incident. The university had started to build a gym on Morningside Park, on the slope leading to Harlem (but accessible only from the summit above) for the exclusive use of Columbia College students. Considered insensitive and racially charged, the gym was eventually abandoned. But it was an architectural incident that set fire to the already confrontational climate of a time that included the Vietnam War, the assassination of MLK, and May ’68 in Paris. More than 50 years later, it is the contention of our Columbia studio that while there was possibly nothing sinister about building a gym at that location, everything else was wrong: The elitist program was accessible only to Columbia students, with no regard for the Harlem community below it. The gym proposal interacted with Olmsted’s park design with complete disregard for its topography, planning, and social use. The architecture was essentially mediocre. The result was an insult to program intelligence, to site intelligence, to social and political intelligence, and to architectural intelligence, with the predictable result of the protests that followed. Our studio will investigate how the gym (and other programs) could have been designed otherwise on the same complex and challenging site. REVERSING THE CLICHÉS OF “GREEN” The last few years have seen an inordinate amount of pseudo-“greening” of cities, whereby streets are covered with trees, building balconies are covered with trees, and roofs are covered with trees. If such a reversal of history is here to stay (cities are historically about culture, not nature), it is the contention of this studio that existing trees and parks ought to accommodate buildings, too. We feel that a carefully planted building inside Morningside Park is a reasonable reciprocal proposition. CONCEPT + SITE + PROGRAM The studios run by Bernard Tschumi over the past few years have taken their starting point from the idea of “Concept.” Namely, that there is no architecture without an organizing concept. In this semester, we will look at “Concept and Site” at how a concept affects a site, or a site affects a concept; how topography and social context can become an opportunity rather than a constraint. The gym will be one of six programs developed respectively by six pairs of students. The other five are a museum with A.I.R, a clinic, a school, a performance center, and a library. Various modes of notation and representation will also be investigated.
THE 1968 GYM MORNINGSIDE PARK In 1960, Columbia University proposed the construction of a new gym in Morningside Park. A way to keep students fit, beautifying the crumbling Morningside Park. However, The construction of this gym started a huge student protest & strike which temporarily shut down Columbia and was part of a huge chain student uprisings around the world.
CONTEXT & CULTURE To make matters worse, Columbia professors were heavily involved with weapon development research for the Vietnam War, a war wildly unpopular college campuses. Having this in the background upon the proposition of the segregated doors was a recipe for disaster.
The Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and Students for Afro-American Society (SAS) led these protests. They joined forces and held a rally, which then turned into a university-wide, week long student protest. The protest was non-violent at first, but by the end of the week police were sent to stop the demonstration. Protestors tore down the fence around the construction site and occupied four academic buildings. After negotiations to change the gym/vietnam policies failed, this protest turned into a student strike big enough to convince administrators to cancel all plans for the gym and terminate all ties with Vietnam weapon research.
Roughly 20 years later in 1873, a Preliminary study of the park shows the Manhattan grid was revised. Due to the aggressive change in topography the plan was changed to remove the city grid and devote the space for a public park. This revision also indicates an Urban pressure over the park, with proposals for program in the park such as an Open Theatre and a Library.
Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux design for the park. English landscape design style. Curved Paths, dense trees areas, and punctual free disposition of elements.
If a park in a metropolis has always been a massive artificial manipulation of Nature, and if the parks final goal is to create a fictional world made of romantic perspectives and botanical illusions; if the park is all of this - an urban void for human leisure no more natural that the city itself. Then the landscape and architecture are interchangeable, and building in a park can become an act of honest revelation.
Fontana Mix 1958 by John Cage. Notes as Fragments By examining the existing site, and overlaying our collage of John Bachman, we begin to manipulate the site of our project, and we begin to understand the depth of the topography and start to erode the imagary to understand the leftover spaces of the site. The fragments are arranged as notes in a musical notation, and the in between spaces become the place for improvised musical performances.
ARCHITECTONICS OF MUSIC STEVEN HOLL & DIMITRA TSACHRELIA SPRING STUDIO INTRODUCTION The fusion of structure and light in Gothic architecture left us with genuine constructions of spirit and spatial energy. With music at the heart of its spaces, sculpture and painting were integral to the art of architecture. In an ultramodern way we could aim today for the fusion of structure and light. Architecture of inspired rhythm, counterpoint and scale analogous to certain works of modern music could strive for a synthesis of the arts. As music has an interior concept but no facades, we focus on the interior space, the quality of the spatial overlap, the potential of genuine structure fused with the power of natural daylight. Art, and, above all, music, has a fundamental function to draw towards a total exaltation in which the individual mingles, losing his consciousness in a truth immediate, rare, enormous, and perfect. If a work of art succeeds in this undertaking, even for a single moment, it attains its goal. -Iannis Xenakis PATRA, GREECE We focus this studio in Patras, Greece at a time when the country of the origin of Democracy has economic suffering as well as international migration stress. Patra, the third largest city in Greece, is located on the northern side of Peloponnese and its port is considered the gateway of Greece to Europe. The hypothesis for the project is a patron, like the Stavros Niarchos foundation, intends to build a cultural compels focused on music and art along the waterfront of Patras. Our imagined patron pledges €650 million to activate the Patra’s waterfront with a series of cultural buildings positioned between the marina and the harborside wit th the sea as backdrop along this waterfront promenade. PROGRAM Working with music by Iannis Xenakis the studio will develope six experimental compositions in the first half of the semester. The second half is focused on an effort to propose public pavillions and waterfront spaces invigorating the city of Patra, Greece. In spirt of the Stavros Niarchos Foundation’s $650 million gift which enabled the construction of a huge park, library and opera house for Athens, Greece designed by Renxo Piano. We propose a gift of $100 million to build a waterfront park and music and education pavillions for the city of Patra. The architecture is envisioned to be inspiring and welcoming, drawing the public infor daytime and nighttime events, while managed by an economically minimal staff. The education elements will be in collaberation with Patra University.
The masterplan proposal is an extension of the urban grid of Patras through the abandoned pier of the old port. By reshaping the geometry of the existing pier - which is in drastic need of architectural intervention, the new site will adapt to the new proposals for School of Music & Art for the University of Patra, and a Public Performance space. The proposal will provide the city with an open plaza which links the two projects together. The space between the proposals is connected through public salt-water pool, and a matrix of rectangular and triangulated spaces that provide opportunities for seating and shade from local vegetation. The first project acts as a gateway to the city, which is reminiscent of the traditional Greek vernacular through the relationship to the polikatekia and street-front arcades. This project sets the tone for the articulation of the combined pier proposal, and slowly fades into the sea through the unexpected geometries of the Performance Space. The Performance space influences public movement to the end of the pier and provides a great opportunity for user-to-user interaction and dramatically sets the scene to beautiful views of the sea and mountain landscape once drawn by a young Le Corbusier.
"I propose a world of sound-masses, vast groups of sound-events, clouds and galaxies governed by new characteristics such as density, degree of order, and rate of change, which required definitions and realizations using probability theory. Thus stocastic music was born" -XENAKIS