ex-tension
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//res extensa “A bodily thing is extended through its qualities in(to) a given place, and the extension of a place in turn results in a space as the scene of coexisting things.� -Descartes
rodney a. bell [ selected projects ]
[1]
If the Roman urbs was concerned with the abstract structuring of private interests within a system of scalar totality--duplicated centers--then the organizational space of the contemporary city organizes the various scales of private interests from the enclaves of detached homes--propagated utilizing fordist“agricultural logistics”--to the distributed factory, the “non-physical entities whose jobs are outsourced to a variety of locations.”
Keller Easterling [2]
superporto do açu
rio de jane rodney a. bell [ selected projects ]
superporto do aรงu
eiro [3]
Architecture, inherently charged with negotiatiung aesthetic resolution and functional performance, finds itself at a critical juncture. There is no longer an architecture unto itself. Architecture , as a profession, cannot answer only to its own desires. The city, operating as an extended field of complex relations, must be negotiated explicitly on architectural terms. Dichotomies of ‘top-down’ or ‘bottom-up’ produce reductive solutions and must be transgressed instead for architectures of contingencies--loose structures of accommodation. As the metropolis of the 20th Century dissolves into the megalopolis of today, architecture must provide the necessary approaches to negotiaing human environments in this extended field.
[4]
/contents Resume
6
_projects [de]toxicity
8
/Cornell University_Option Studio
Manhattanism 2.0
32
/Cornell University NYC_Exploration Studio C
ruminations
42
Poche:
The Expanded Public
44
Porocity
54
/Cornell University_Design Seminar
Transit:
A New Urban Ground
56
/Cornell University NYC_Exploration Studio A
Formal Base[s]
64
/Cornell University NYC_Exploration Studio B
Rights to the City
70
/SP Arc_Undergraduate Thesis
_practice
80
_research Infrastructure & Instrumentality
82
/Cornell University_Anthropology Material Theory I
Taming Nature:
London Underground
/Cornell University_Theory Seminar:
Territorial Infrastructure: /Cornell University_Theory Seminar:
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84
Taming Nature
Port Cities
86
Taming Nature
[5]
/education Cornell University - GPA: |M.Arch II
/experience 3.81
2012-2013
Southern Polytechnic State University - GPA: 3.78 |B.Arch - magna cum laude
2006-2011
Bainbridge College - GPA: 3.68 |General Studies - Dean’s List
2004-2006
Cairo High School
2000-2004
Cornell University - Teaching Assistant 129 Sibley Dome, Ithaca, New York Mark Morris (professor) mm789@cornell.edu/607 255 8418 Student Consultation/Presentation/Coordination
2012-2013
DVA Architecture - Project Designer 260 Peachtree Street, Atlanta, Georgia Bill Davis (Principal) billdavis@THW.com/404 539 1631 SD/DD/CD/CA/Coordination/Visualization/Graphics
2011-2012
Lew Oliver, Incorporated - Intern 65 Sloan Street, Atlanta, Georgia Lew Oliver (Principal) /770 643 3938 SD/DD/Coordination/Visualization/Graphics
2007-2008
College Prep & Technology Prep Diploma
cairo/ga
nxne >
atlanta/ga sp_arc lew oliver, inc dva architecture ithaca/ny cornell aap
new york city/ny cornell aap
[6]
/media skills
/recognition
_production Rhino Maya Google Sketchup Revit Architecture Autocad
2012
Hartell Scholarship - Cornell University
2011
Thesis Published - Polychrome Magazine_SP Arc Student Work Publication magna cum laude - Southern Polytechnic State University First Place - Thesis Competition Faculty Choice - Thesis Competition Student’s Choice - Thesis Competition
2010
Project Exhibited - Young Architects Forum [YAF] Spring Salon Light Fixture Published - Design Communication Association Conference
2009
Second Place - Furniture Design Competition Project Exhibited - Young Architects Forum [YAF] Summer Salon First Place - SPSU Design Competition
2008
Project Published - Polychrome Magazine_SP Arc Student Work Publication
2007
First Place - SPSU Design Competition
_visualization Vray Rhino Render KeyShot Render Podium Render Rhino Render Geographical Information Systems (GIS) 10 _graphics Full Adobe Suite _analogue Laser Cutting Woodshop Certified Model Building Hand Drafting
r e s u m e final reviews cornell aap
rodney a. bell [ selected projects ]
[7]
_reforming the company town [de]Toxicity is an urban proposition predicated upon the existing industrial and economic conditions emerging around Brazil’s Santos Bain, a newly-discovered oil-rich region located off of Brazil’s eastern coast. As industry globally dispersed--acquiring such sites for production-certain urban nodes emerge. This investigation questions the relationship between urban sites of production and their surrounding social and ecological contexts. Furthermore, the Santos Basin is estimated to sustain twenty years of petroleum extraction. What types of urbanism accommodates finite temporaility and growth? How can architecture and urbanism set conditions which accommodate such economic, social and ecological contingencies? As the oil extraction and processing operations phase out, what new industries--perhaps already latent--can provide more sustainable social, economic, and ecological framework?*
+
[de]toxicity: parasitic petropolis Cornell AAP_Option Studio professor Neeraj Bhatia
*This investigation stems from The Petropolis of Tomorrow--a collaborative investigation into cities emerging from mineral and resource extraction. This partnership includes: Harvard GSD, Rice University School of Architecture, Cornell University AAP, and The South America Project.
[8]
rodney a. bell [ selected projects ]
[9]
_infrastructural landscapes
The urbanism emergiing from resource extraction and production operates not on an infitite growth model--rather, this urbanism is predicated upon an approximately twenty-year temporal horizon. As such, what infrastructural strategies can provide a framework for both the oil processing that will inevitably occur on this very site and a more sustainable socio-economic and ecological future?
Cangoa
Peroa
Golfino
Because Barra do Furado, the local village contains already a local fishing industry and is situated near Brazil’s ‘sardine belt’ aquaculture provides an industrial and ecological solution to these social and economic issues.
Roncador P-09 107 P-26 107
Albacora SSV Victoria
Vermelho Carapeba
Campos
Parati Floatel Reliance
P-38 96
Offshore Mischief
Enchoya
105
Badejo
Selian 111
P-32 83
P-40 112
P-48 100
Marlim Leste
Marlim Sul 109 NP Sedco 706 150 P-52 122
P-54 98 Sun Rise 2000 154
Petrobras X 109
Ocean Worker 76
P-20 132
Albacora Leste
P-52 102
200
Cherne
Macae
Piranema 97
P-52 102
180
Vitoria 10000 199
Marlim Sul
Linguado
Rio De Janeiro
Furthermore, what life cycles are associated with these territories of temporality--industrial, ecological,and social?
Pampo P-35 92
Deep Ocean Clarion 188 P-19 109
P-43 100 Ocean Winner 96 P-65 95
Stena Drillmax 180 P-40 100
P-43 89 P-51 178 P-56 200
SS Pantanal 158
Sao Paulo
Campos Basin
Blackford Dolphin 95
Tambau
Ocean Quest 99
10.8
In billion boe
Ocean Lexington 106
PJS-559
Atlanta Ocean Ambassador 108
BS-4
Ocean Star 103
Urugua
Belmonte
Sea Explorer 112
Pirapitanga carapia
Mexilhao
GSF Arctic 1 110
petropolis research 6.8
PJS-539
Pride of Venezuela 200
Noble Clyde Bourdreaux 200
Ocean Baroness 138
Parati Panoramix
West Orion 180
Noble Dave Beard 200
Merluza
Cajun Express 158
Capixaba 96
Carioca
Pride of the South AtLantic 109
Sevan Driller 140
Newton Bem-Te-Vi
Guara
Ocean Valor 164
Piracuca
Contingent Resources
Bijupira and Salema 168
BSS-70 Caramba
Tubarao
Jupiter
tupi
West Eminence 128
Santos Basin
Azulao 180
West Polaris
sidon
Deepwater discovery 140
lone Star 94
Tiro
Falcon 100 114
Caravela Caravela Sul Pride of Mexico 90
Ocean Yorktown
Cavalo Marinho Atlantic Star 90
100
Deepwater Navigator 128
104
Santos Basin
Borgny Dolphin
0km
[ 10 ]
50
100
3.0
The studio began with an4.8 intensive six 1.3 4.8 week investigation into the landscapes of resource extraction, processing, distribution, ecology, and comany 6.7 town precedent 6.5 4.8 analysis which culminated with the publication of over 600 pages research for referMar/08 D&M Sep/09 D&M Dec/10 ence D&M throughout the semester.
PJS-551
200
300
500
Delineation Resources
Prospective Resources
power production
administration
storage bulks
underwater turbines
pipelines
oil industry
government
housing + facilities maritime industry
city functions recreational facilities park shipyard
railroad
labor
service canals
wildlife habitat
wetlands
local population local
industry
wastewater treatment
0
CONSTRUCTION
rodney a. bell [ selected projects ]
wastewater treatment
OIL INDUSTRY
aquatic farming
+25
FISHING INDUSTRY
[ 11 ]
territorial strategies
Controlling Growth
Controlling Contamination
(re)Organizing Ecologies
Conversion & Coexistence
[de]Toxification* [personal focus]*
Inhabitation
[de]Toxification
Inhabitation
The ring is ostensibly an explicit formal statement against growth. However, it performs as a definition of territory, demarcating the toxic interior and a zone of mediation.
[Zuhal Kol] The industrial ‘X’ represents the public and industrial functions which transfer uses and meaning as the oil industry is phased out. These function both nourish and are nourished by the bar programs.
plan strategies
Conversion & Coexistence [ 12 ]
This highly formal statement dissolves into the ecological zones of flow and flux of the surrounding wetlands, tributary networks, and flood zones.
The aquacultural bars deal with hydraulogical flow on two fronts: [1]actively cleaning watershed and industrial waste; and [2]passively absorbing the seasonal flooding of the surrounding wetlands.
Within the boundary zone, ecological systems become highly organized and integrated with industrial and aquacultural inputs and outputs.
[Julia Gamonlina] The housing bars, cut by two tributaries, creating districts which operate independently of the bar logic and question what implications attend ‘living with one’s waste’.
territorial convergence_Not only is the site situated at a critical socio-
economic juncture of production and processing; the site is also situated at a critical ecological convergence of a vast territorial network of canals, tributaries, watersheds, and wetlands. Beyond these systems, the hydraulogical flow within and through the site presents allows any contamination associated with the oil refinery operations to easily spread throughout the system. Placing oil refiineries and other logistical components at this ecological juncture is potentially hazardous and therefore must be articulated to minimize risk of contamination of this ecological system.
0
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500m
1000m
2000m
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H
H
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200
400
800
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PHASE 5: INFRASTRUCTURAL CONVERSION As petroleum resources diminish, the aquacultural industries expand and various scales both within and beyond the boundary zones.
systems phasing
PHASE 4: AQUACULTURE EXPANSION Farming expands along with the fish hatcheries while the housing ‘neighborhoods’ emerge in order to accommodate this emergent workforce.
PHASE 3: AQUACULTURE EXPANSION As production operations grow, the boundary zones are constructed along with the waste-remediation wetland bar in order to assist in both negotiating systems boundaries and to re-deploy waste throughout the site.
PHASE 2: CONSTRUCTED BOUNDARY As production operations grow, the waste boundary and processing zones are created with the periphery berms and industrial wetlands bar. Additional housing absorbs a growing workforce from both oil and maritime operations.
BERM AND IN-FLOODING ZONE OVERFLOW WETLANDS POWER PRODUCTION SHIPYARDS
PHASE 1B: AUXILLARY INFRASTRUCTURE These support infrastructures allow the production systems to interface to offsite and global flows and production(s). Additionally, housing begins to expand with phasing-in of the oil operations.
temporal strategies_ What distinguishes landsape urbanism is a focus on explicitly formal processes unfolding over time. The complexity of a framework which accommodates such vastly different uses, however, is most efficiently handled across spaces. As such, these temporal components are not planned in a linear way; rather they are interfaced to each other in formal and temporal configurations such that each component of phasing generates another. In this way, the landscape performs according to temporal and spatial demands, rather than abstract benchmarks.
OIL REFINERIES
PHASE 1A: INFRASTRUCTURAL CONNECTORS The oil infrastructure, based on existing oil pipeline locations, is constructed first in order to initiate operations and install an ordering system for the various site production(s).
Transfer Stations
construction phasing
[ 16 ]
0/barra do furado
+3/housing expansion
+8/production, infrastructure, aquaculture
dredge phasing Perimeter Berms
Dredging along the perimeter creates an in-flooding zone where seasonal floodwaters may flood into the perimeter resevoirs but treated water within cannot flow into the surrounding estuaries.
Continuous Canal Dredging
These zones which collect silt must be continuously dredged in order to accommodate the required draught clearances for the tankers to enter the shipyards.
Initial Canal Dredging
remediation process
The canal, which is currently dredged to 9 meters, will have to be further deepened in order to accommodate larger maritime vessels.
Initial Canal Dredging
The canal, which is currently dredged to 9 meters, will have to be further deepened in order to accommodate larger maritime vessels.
Breakwaters
Breakwater barries protect the harborfrom harsh currents and contains harbor contaminants.
Continuous Shoreline Restoration As the southwestly currents wash away this dredge berm/breakwater, they will have to be constantly replensished utilizing the remediated canal dredge sediments.
+12/farming, housing, aquaculture expansion
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+15/aquaculture expansion + oil conversion
+20/aquaculture expansion industry expansion
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[ 18 ]
macro water flow
Power Generation
Canal Partially Diverted
As water is strategically diverted from the main canal onto the bars, the top strip allows for controlled flooding to withstand the added pressure.
Part of the water passes through a deployable power generator, which utilizes the resultant pressure.
This portion of the investigation focused on hyrdaulogical flow and the associated processes dealing with water reclamation, remediation, and redeployment.
Mediation Zone
These edge zones allow for water storage and in-flooding, which occurs seasonally in this area.
Clean water Discharge
Bypass Lines
These connections allow wastewater from the residential bars to flow to the fisheries for reuse.
Water is pumped using the canal’s natural pressure to the top of the bars where it percolates down through each system.
Tidal Flush
As the tide rises, a reverse flow brings saltwater into the system. This water is absorbed and reused for shrimp farming.
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G S I N N DN G P I P L A S I DS G S H E T U LAN MIN W O ET AR HW F
Ecological Interface
N
R IO WE CT PO ODU PR
The wetland boundaries at the end of each bar negotiates the constructed systems within to the indeterminate beyond the edge. Sectional properties allow for both water storage in peripheral resevoirs and in-flooding from the surrounding wetlands.
Waste Processing Surfaces
S IE G ER N CH S I T A H O U SH H FI
S
U
Ecological Interface
As the tributaries--which have been polluted from surrounding farmland runoff--move through the site, they are cleansed in absorptive wetlands. These wetlands also alleviate the seasonal flood surges.
G
N
I
O
H
OIL
OIL
G S SIN ND G
U A N ES HO TL S I NG E U I E R IN G
M
O W H
R FA
The ‘wetland’ bars process both heavy industrial waste (liquid and sediment waste from refinery operations and dredging operations) and biological waste from the surrounding communities.
SH FI O H
H
A U
T
C S
H
U
HO
Productive Surface Systems
G
SIN
I
O
IL
These bars carry the more aquaculture productive functions--fish farming and produce harvesting. They are adjacent to the old and new housing bars and deliver nourished water to the wetlands for re-deployment.
aquaculture systems
labor
contaminated water
oil exports
wastewater
agricultural output
oil imports
cleaned water
aquacultural output
maritime shipping
re-introduced water
power production
automotive shipping
0
1 km
2 km
locomotive shipping 4 km
< previous page [ 20 ]
aquaculture & farming The boundary zones, shown here at the fish hatchery bar (left) and farming bar (right) exhibit this indeterminate zone which absorbs seasonal inflooding of clean water while preventing outflooding of contaminated water.
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aquaculture systems
< previous page [ 22 ]
oil industry conversion
The public spaces, originally inhabited by industrial bulk storage are later transferred to fish hatcheries and other public uses. This ‘X’ in plan derives from the existing oil lines--an explicit formal and urban statement of the city’s raison d’etre.
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sediment processing & shipyard
< previous page [ 24 ]
â&#x20AC;&#x153;What this mutual encroaching of the inside and outside indicates is that inside and outside never cover the entire space. There is always an excess--a third space--that gets lost between the division between inside and outside. In human dwellings, there is an intermediate space which is disavowed. We all know it exists but we do not accept its existence. It remains ignored and most unsayable. The main content of this invisible space is excrement...We, of course know well--rationally--how excrement leaves the house but our immediate phenomenological relation to it is a more radical one. It is as if shit disappears into some--when we flush the toilet--nether world out-of-site...This, incidentally, I think is why one of the most unpleasant experiences is to observe when the toilet gets blocked...We rely on this space but we ignore it.â&#x20AC;? --Slavoj Zizek
[2] Dredge Material Processed H
Processed water percolates through material before being sent to adjacent wetlands
[1] Dredge Material Arrives H
Dredge boats offload material at the shipyard which is placed into wetland bars.
[3] Process Cycle
The dredge material goes through several cycles of percolation and aeration before further reuse for landforming.
[1] Wastewater Input
Wastewater is pre-processed at the treatment facility before being discharged into the filtration system.
[2] Wastewater Input
After percolating through sediment, water is filtered and passed to the next stage
[3] Filtered Water Output
After several stages of filtration the water is either diverted for reuse or discharged into the surrounding wetlands.
sediment processing
The sediment processing bar, adjacent to housing, functionally processes dredge material for continuous redeployment. This operation further explores the notion of living with oneâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s waste, making this suddenly immediate to daily practice.
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[ 26 ]
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/outputs
[ 30 ]
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[ 31 ]
Manhattan’s history is marked by forms of control. However, Rem Koolhaas elucidates the paradoxical nature of these visions of ‘poetic control.’ While the various visions that shaped and imagined the city throughout history ostensibly sought a reconciliation of the complexities of the metropolis, it is precisely these complexitities which mark its allure. Moreover, the various visions of control have come to rely on destruction and renewal in efforts to secure municipal, social, economic, and even ecological stability. These overbearing forms of control and vision have stigmatized such approaches to shaping the city and generating urbanism; however, in the same contradictory vein, such large, bureaucratically imposed visions are precisely what is required to effectively shape the city. Manhattanism 2.0 questions the extent to which urban growth and development necessarily requires destruction. Relying on ‘transgression,’ Manhattanism 2.0 re-orients the metropolis’ urbanization in the horizontal direction, allowing for economic growth and more democratic connectivity.
+
[ 32 ]
manhattanism 2.0
Cornell AAP NYC_Exploration Studio
professors: Shohei Shigematsu and Christy Cheng
rodney a. bell [ selected projects ]
[ 33 ]
visions of restrained control
Manhattan has operated through a constant extension outwards from the island. Already, Queens and Brooklyn are absorbing this growth. Roosevelt Island is situated between these two Manhattans--currently in its developmental blindspot. However, as the economy cycles back into prosperity, development will inevitably capitalize on its proximity. Branded as a suburban enclave to Manhattanâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s prototypical urbanity, densification and over-development of Roosevelt Island will destroy--for better or worse--the environment that is so precious to those who live on the island. Manhattanism 2.0 allows this jump to Queens to occur while maintaining the islands spatial identity and subsequently generating new dialogues between the two.
post-modern exhaustion visions of Faustian control
modern anxiety
metropolitan visions â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;poetic controlâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;
[ 34 ]
structuring growth
organizing the city visions of renewal
rodney a. bell [ selected projects ]
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[ 36 ]
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[ 37 ]
manhattan interface
[ 38 ]
Beginning with Cornell University’s technology campus planned for Roosevelt Island and Mayor Bloomberg’s catalyzation of the technology industry sector, Manhattanism 2.0 responds to the shifting nature of industry from manufacturing to research and development. The ‘piers’ link Manhattan to various points connected into Queen’s fabric linking housing with Midtown with the piers programs.
These programs include temporary and shared workspaces, allowing for multiple scales of economic investment and research to occur, and for an effective cross-fertilization between participants. Additional programs include exhibition areas and training areas for a reeducation of the general workforce to engage this new employment sector.
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[ 39 ]
[ 40 ]
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[ 41 ]
The demands of practice expose certain contradictions of spatial production laden within the profession that extend into society. Often, practice involves necessarily maintaining hypocritical values. This reconciled such personal hypocricy through various explorations which are intended to elucidate and play off of such contraditions within contemporary spatial production. These extrapolations, in a way, present rather realistically, the socio-spatial complexities facing the city. Not going so far as to prescribe solutions, these studies are meant primarily to be expositions, laying bare the spatial dimensions to societal complexities and contradictions involved with neo-liberal spatial production.
+
[ 42 ]
ruminations
thoughts and preoccupations
“Western society chose to accumulate rather than to live...creating a contradiction between enjoying and economizing whose drama would thereafter hold society in an iron grip” -H. Lefebvre Apartment for the New Bourgeois presents opportunities for self-expression through the presentation of one’s material excess. Working similarly to Facebook, one may present their accumulations while concealing the resultant insecurity.
This Linear City imagines current urban neoliberalization extrapolated to a point such that all public property and space has been privatized. Air space over interstate is rendered a highways a ‘last frontier’ of public space. Implementing these ‘freespaces’ over the interstate creates a heterotopic spatial realm that is both removed and in opposition to the consumer city to which it is anchored. These structures house residential, public, and small-scaled commercial spaces in a concentrated configuration that fosters grassroots community involvement. linear city_atlanta, georgia
rodney a. bell [ selected projects ]
[ 43 ]
This studio asserted a revisiting of the tensions between public and private space that are necessarily embedded within the design process and architecture, in general. The existing berm condition on the site--a project given--offers a unique thickening of the modernist open and abstract conception of public space. While pragmatically negotiating the two levels of the existing dorms, negating the need or elevators, the berm conceptually expands the public ground plane in section, offering more fluid and generative relationships between residents and creating a social condenser of sorts. The program, roughly 30,000 feet, consists of dorms accommodating 80 beds, a symposium space for the forthcoming Institute for Public Action, and a contemplative space. The design aims to embed the public elements--courtyards, plazas, and the symposium space--within and between the more private programmatic elements-the dormitories and resident apartments.
+
[ 44 ]
haverford college, dorms and institute for public action Cornell AAP_Option Studio advisors: Tod Williams & Billie Tsien
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0
site plan
[ 46 ]
25
50
10
20
classro
om A
studen
t lounge
courtya
rd
mecha
nical spa ce
contem
sympos
plation
ium spa ce
classro
om B
space
courtya
rd
inner pla za
apartm
ent D
ground level plan
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recept
ion are a
media
room
directo r’s office
confere
nce roo m
assista
nts offi ce
sympos
ium spa ce
contem plation below space
women’s
faculty rr
men’s
apartm
ent A
courtya
rd
lounge
plaza bel ow
kitchen
rr
men’s
t.o. berm level plan
restroom
women’s
rr
apartm
ent B apartm
ent C
study
area
shared social
restroom
s
spaces
shared
restroom
s
shared
restroom
social
contem pla below
tion spa ce
study
spaces
study
upper level plan shared
[ 48 ]
restroom
social
spaces
space
spaces
section through auditorium
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As seen in the plans, sections, and views here, the programmartic elements form a transitional thickened space where public space--formalized through the berm--cascades over the berm edge while nesting its programmatic types: symposium programs, courtyards and contemplation space. The threshold created as one passes under the dormitory bar and down into the courtyard serves to dramatize this programmatic configuration. [ 49 ]
section through courtyard
[ 50 ]
Reflecting Quaker ethos and practice, the worship space maintains an interior austerity and reluctance to hierarchy. Nested into this inbetween zone, the worship space embodies a dialogue between individual development and social awareness, a central tenet to Quaker beliefs.
section through contemplation space
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[ 51 ]
section through courtyard
[ 52 ]
section model through courtyard
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[ 53 ]
Performing as a dynamic entryway to Union Square-14th Street Station in Manhattan, Porocity examines the relationship between program and form. Union Square, known historically for its accommodation of societies more vocal and alternative forms, hosts diverse and discursive programmatic variations including--but not limited to: corporate-sponsored exercise workshops, illegal drug deals, musical performance of all varieties and combinations. The non-linear nature of such programmatic juxtapositions requires an equally non-linear approach to articulating such combinations and contradictions. The process begins disjunctively with a single peice, modelled and then processed through a series of authored mutations and further adjusted into the site with these ambiguously defined programs. The porous form accommodates the complex flows of people moving and gathering around the southwest entrance of the station.
+
[ 54 ]
porocity: permutational form Cornell AAP NYC_Design Seminar professor: hart marlow
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[ 55 ]
Indeterminacy through contradction defines the metropolis. This state of obfuscation carries into the legibility of the built environment. What appears as edge is thickened, indeterminite, and often beyond comprehension. Roosevelt Island’s shoreline, cartographically drawn through years of mapping is tied to industrial, marine, oceanic ecologies--a boundary in constant flux. The notion of ‘ground’ operates beyond a mere surface condition and is often thickened and layered. The concept of housing--fixed and static--must also accommodate such indeterminacy. (Re)connecting the Queensboro Bridge pathway to the Roosevelt Island subway station with a pre-fabricated housing system, this charrette aims to indentify opportunities for infrastructural integration. This system provides alternative housing types and configurations which accommodate new relationships between housing, commerce, infrastructure, and urban growth.
+
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transit: a new urban ground Cornell AAP NYC_Exploration Studio professors Laila Seewang + Rafi Segal
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[ 58 ]
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2 br units + horz. circulation
1 br units + vert. circulation
recreational spaces
commercial + recreation park space
commons marketspace tidal park space subway station
restorative wetlands
[ 60 ]
â&#x20AC;&#x153;The building is not something that occupies the site but rather that the activity of the architect is to construct the site...The diagonal mediates the horizontality of the ground and the verticality of the building...collaps[ing] the distinction between the figure and the ground.â&#x20AC;? -Stan Allen - Landform Building
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4
3
3
5
6 2
1
6
2
1. Expandable Commercial Unit 2. Expandable Micro Residential Unit 3. Two-Bedroom Unit - Bedroom Level 4. One-Bedroom Unit 5. Public Plaza 6. Two-Bedroom Unit - Living Level 7. Restorative Wetland - Shoreline 8. Community Gardens 9. Market 10. Street Level 11. Entry Mezzanine - Roosevelt Island Station
8
2
10 11 9
[ 62 ]
6 5 7
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Form, generating the very means through which we, as subjects, inhabit and use space is often an expression of certain values, programs, or themes. Rarely do designers allow our spatial determinations to be influenced by factors over which we have no control. The very determination of form and thereof program has historically been the primacy of spatial control. This exercise begins with an object dissected. Upon disection and analysis, certain spatial logics emerge and are then extrapolated and mutated into programmatic schema. The greenhouse, container of the exotic throughout history, by its very nature, allows what does not ecologically belong to fluorish. Difference, contained within, creates an exotic environment to be consumed by the spectator. This relationship between difference, continuity, and disjunction inform the formal explorations of this project.
+
[ 64 ]
formal bas[es]: continuity & difference Cornell AAP NYC_Exploration Studio professors: ferda kolatan & hart marlow
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waterlily (Nymphaeaceae)
[river_scape] cattails (typha)
duckweed (Lemnoideae) wild rice (Zizania)
bladderworts (Utricularia) water celery (Vallisneria americana) cattails (typha) curly pondweed (Vallisneria americana)
[wetlands] [ t r o p i c al c l i m a t e g r e e n h o u s e ] [arid climate greenhouse] [community gardens ]
[ p a r k _ s c a p e] foxtail grasses (diaspore)
artichoke
pennsylvania sedge (carex-pensylvanica)
avacado papaya
dragon fruit
wild columbine (Aquilegia canadensis) guava
kumquat
wild blue lupine (Lupinus perennis) olive
butterfly weed (Asclepias tuberosa) watermelon
goldenrod (Solidago)
rodney a. bell [ selected projects ]
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rodney a. bell [ selected projects ]
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As cities expand under the spector of neoliberal growth and development, there is little opportunity for unscripted social interaction. This reproduction of non-places, understood in this investigation as spaces of scripted consumption-consumption of lifestyles, commodities, events, spectacle, et cetera. There exists, however, a strong tension between rational urban growth models and the ‘lived’ city--that heterotopic sector of urban growth, which accommodates uses and demographics which do not fit into current modes of consumption. This thesis explores a collision between the global spaces of rational use--the modern airport-and the local spaces of urban reproduction. Employing a concept of ‘structured irregularity,’ these two dialectical systems interact and operate in dialogue in simultaneously structured and indeterminite ways. The thesis questions what new subjectivities emerge within this system of collision.
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[ 70 ]
rights to the city: modes of agency in the non-place SP_Arc_Undergraduate Thesis
advisors: Manole Voroneanu & Ermal Shpuza
rodney a. bell [ selected projects ]
[ 71 ]
MARTA Mass Transit Extension
Chinatown Center
program [contextualization]
[re]formatting the program
Beginning with the airport program in its most rational typological configuration, the organization is then contextualized into the site, thereby maintaining its inner-rationality while weaving through the intricacies of Atlantaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Chinatown.
surface strategies
20 degrees [ 72 ]
Proximity Abatement
Adjacent Neighborhood
Tarmac & Terminal Spaces
Runway Approach Clearance
Atlantaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Chinatown, host to a demographically diverse population, has been atomized into the margins of the city. This thesis intends to at-once integrate these commercial and residential factions into a mutable urban configuration and interface this indeterminate zone into the more rational airport program, providing a means of dislodgment and staging situations of heightened awareness within the typically passive global spaces of flow.
rodney a. bell [ selected projects ]
[ 73 ]
terminal interface
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[ c o m p o n e n t
a x o n ]
[steel girder] [tube steel superstructure]
[exterior cladding]
[steel secondary structure]
[light gauge steel canopy]
[tube steel pier superstructure] [steel girder truss substructure]
“[t]he diagonal mediates the horizontality of the ground and the verticality of building. Surface is less important than silhouette, and the primary means of signification is iconic (as opposed to indexical or symbolic). The profile of the building on the landscape promotes a kind of immediate legibility, while the experience up close--like that of the landscape itself--is immersive and haptic. The distinction between occupiable surface and enclosing surface is minimized, which inturn activates the building envelope itself and collapses the distinction between figure and ground.” --Stan Allen
[LiteSteel® Technologies lightweight spans]
[prefab wall systems]
u d y ]
rodney a. bell [ selected projects ]
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concourse interface
[exhibition hall]
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1
1
[recreation fields] This image was taken at a nearby abandoned lot that locals have repurposed as several soccer fields.
2
2
3
3
4
5 5
[runoff reservoir] After the water has been properly and naturally treated, resevoir storage makes it publicly accessilbe and safe for recreation, evidenced by this example in Boulder, Colorado.
4
[constructed wetlands] Artificial wetlands are an ecologically supportive waste management solution for both gray- and black-water filtration from the airports’ discharge.
[indiangrass] A Georgia native species, indiangrass grows naturally with as little as two hours of sunlight per day and prevents site erosion.
[bioswales] These vegetative trenches direct and clean runoff water from the areas north of the site to prevent soil erosion and the percolation of runoff toxins into the soil and water table.
landscape performance [l
oc
al
cr
ee
ks
]
[peac
htree
creek
]
to c ha
rodney a. bell [ selected projects ]
ttah
ooc
hee
rive
r >
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2
1
3 3 3
10
4
5
12 11
3 6
3
3 13
15
14
7
ground level plan
Outdoor Amphitheatre (1) Soccer Fields (2) Community Piers (3) Marketspace (4) Arrival Dropoff/Bus Station (5) Baggage Claim (6) Ground Service Facilities (7) Aircraft Parking Apron (8) Existing Peachtree-Dekalb Airport Property (9) Conference Center & Performance Hall(10) proposed MARTA Airport North metro station(11) Ticketing/Check-in Area(12) Commercial/Dining Spaces(13) Security Checkpoint(14) Main Concourse(15)
8
9
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main level plan
â&#x20AC;&#x153;Atlanta is not a city, it is a landscape...Its artificiality sometimes makes it hard to tell whether you are inside or outside.â&#x20AC;? --Rem Koolhaas
rodney a. bell [ selected projects ]
[ 79 ]
I was hired as a project designer just before graduating in 2011 at DVA Architecture, a small Atlanta-based practice specializing in high-end cinema. While working at DVA, I was exposed to the realities of practice--cinema design involves an aspiration for high-end design with typically low construction budgets. As the project designer in the office, I took the lead on schematic design for nearly all projects and proposals--ranging from cinemas eateries to student housing, assisted living, and hospitality projects. Because of the firms size, however, I split my efforts between schematic design proposals, construction documentation, and construction administration duties. This dynamic between design, documentation, and construction refined my ability to identify opportunities for both expression and restraint.
project designer
cinergy cinemas, midland, tx_completion, summer 2013
project designer
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practice: dva architecture project designer, atlanta, GA principals: bill davis & mike voetgle
studio movie grill, wheaton, illinois_built
project designer
galaxy moviehouse & eatery, austin, tx_built
rodney a. bell [ selected projects ]
[ 81 ]
_territorial devices Infrastructure, since its formalized beginnings in antiquity, has served an ostensible purpose: to organize the flows of materials, resources, and people through a given area or network of urbanization. These projects are often regarded as benevolently neutral in their apparent benefit. However, investigating more carefully their inceptions, evolution, and materialization reveals deep-seated and often contradictory values. This investigation seeks to understand the discrepancy between the public conception of a given infrastructural project and its underlying instrumentality. It does not aim to assert a hidden agenda of control or subjugation to all infrastructural projects; rather, it offers another lens of understanding into what so commonly constitutes our urban environment. These systems operate in dialogue at both local and territorial scales, offering a comprehensive understanding of the scalar implications of such systems.
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infrastructure & instrumentality
Cornell University_Material Theory I: Landscape and Place professor: adam t. smith
A bodily thing is extended through its qualities in(to) a given place, and the extension of place in turn results in space as the scene of coexisting things. -Descartes
Thus, if “[c]apitalism and neocapitalism have produced abstract space, which includes the ‘world of commodities’, its ‘logic’ and its worldwide strategies, as well as the power of money and that of the political state,” how have such machinations shaped the contemporary landscape? The infrastructural age has passed and the cultural and material landscape is shaped less by grandiose visions. Rather, the neo-liberal landscape is constructed through a fragmentation of territories—a city that is ‘fragmented and fragmenting’ to utilize the terminology of Bernard Tschumi—territories that operate in singular uses: spaces of consumption1, spaces of flows2, spaces of exclusion3, “sites for conflict”4, et cetera. The careful organization of these fragments ensures their proper functioning and autonomy within the abstract system. The infrastructure—the inbetween of such fragments—has taken on new roles in the contemporary city—if such a term is amenable. These instrumentalized devices both organize and operate as territories themselves. Indiscernible, these infrastructural territories have been exposed by urban critics through extensive research. In an ironic reversal, the spaces of the inbetween are becoming the dominant material territories in and of in their own right. Contemporary urbanization perhaps embodies the purest application of Enlightenment absolute spatial structures onto the material or lived spaces of the city. If the Roman urbs was concerned with the abstract structuring of private interests within a system of scalar totality—duplicated centers—then the organizational space of the contemporary city organizes the various scales of private interests from the enclaves of detached homes, propagated utilizing “agricultural logistics for producing a series of identical building operations in succession” to the distributed factory, the “non-physical entities whose jobs are outsourced to a variety of locations.”5 Keller Easterling asserts that the macro patterns of urbanization are resonating even into the realm of architectural thought and design such that such “organizational protocol[s]” were not merely logistical processes that “facilitated architectur[al]” production; rather,” it was the architecture.”6 Therefore, aesthetics, or ‘software’ become inconsequential to overall organizational structure. One does not understand the landscape of cities such as Newark or Los Angeles through aesthetic judgements as is the case with cities such as London or Paris, which are negotiated utilizing subjective cognition. These cities are organized and legible only through the complex network of conduits and containers. As economies globalize and the geographical, cultural, nationalistic, and ethnic lines of difference are dissolved into the logic of flow, certain hierarchies are established on the landscape to absorb place into the abstract flows of organization space. These complex relationships—a conflation of social and economic interests—require equally complex spatial organizations: vast port complexes, free-trade zones, remote server locations, offshore production and distribution facilities augmented by logistical conduits such as highways, railway corridors and rail yards, shipping lanes, et cetera. The territorial agency of such “urban organization lies within the relationship between distributed sites that are connected materially, but which remotely affect each other—sites which are involved not with fusion or holism, but with adjustment.”7 The primary device to negotiate the material constraints associated with these distributed territorial networks is, again, the highway corridor. This type of conduit remains the most efficient means of distributing goods and labor throughout such networks. And these highways, far from being the discrete vector inscribed upon the landscape that marks the cultural imagination from Roman roads to even Jack Kerouac’s desert highway, these conduits constitute infrastructural territories which operate outside of the fragmented lived cities; these infra-structures constitute a continuous space operating in between the fragments—continuous to itself and fragmenting to the city.
The symbolic manifestation of such networks on the urban landscape is the traffic interchange, a node of intersection and among several infrastructural conduits. Easterling argues that although these modes of conveyance are continuous to themselves, constituting singular territories across geographical space, they will—and must—become more continuous to each other as intermodality becomes the new measure of efficiency. Rail, highway, shipping, and airfreight infrastructures have already generated consensus as to their internal organization. Operating as interfaces between each mode, the shipping container has become a logistical common denominator. With this singular commonality, infrastructural territories have emerged— territories where productive overlap of systems is exploited: Port Newark being the most immediate and dramatic example. These territories afford political, economic, and material autonomy and facilitate the larger functions of the neo-liberal city. Such intermodalities and territorialization of flows have increased efficiencies and facilitated the market expansion demanded by capitalistic production—allowing for the distribution of production and consumption into its most efficient markets. As such labor can be exploited at a site across the globe, while its product can be consumed in a site of leisure where appropriate economic demographics occur (or are [re]produced). Furthermore, the exceptions generated by such systems—the underclass of those expelled or ejected from the system (minorities and other less-resilient demographics) are relegated to other sites—slums, government housing, rural areas—and identified through media projections rather than direct experience. This fragmentation—both aided by and potentially dispelled by conveyance infrastructure—is understood best through Lefebvre’s triad notion of lived, perceived, and conceived whereby these modes of spatial production are in constant feedback with each other and reinforced by the fragmentation afforded by these infrastructural networks. The lived city is mediated through such separation and generative of various but disparate meanings according to which lived city one inhabits. As such, the perceptions through which we generate understanding are constantly a function of this mediation. This suburban environment can only engender such meaning when it operates in a fragmented fashion from the radically different environment of the urban core. And such fragmentation is dependent upon the distribution of the city across a territory—as negotiated by an equally territorialized infrastructure. In turn these perceptions affect how the city is further conceived. Tschumi’s assertion of a city that is ‘fragmented and fragmenting’ clarifies this perpetual state of separation associated with the horizontally expanding megalopolis. To be sure, this triad does not operate in a linear manner; the lived, perceived, and conceived modes of spatial production are in constant dialogue. The interaction among these modes of spatial production appears more clearly against their material products. Headlines such as “Atlanta suburbs move to Secede,”1 in order to avoid economically supporting Fulton County’s economically depressed demographics; the suburban rejection of mass transit based explicitly on “race” during a time when more than 50 percent of Atlanta’s Caucasian population fled the city for the suburbs; the construction of major highways which, as Georgia Institute of Technology history professor asserts, “gouge their way through black neighborhoods,…”forcing the removal of many working-class blacks from the central business district”2; the explicit use of Interstate 20 as a racial urban divide with the admission of the Atlanta Bureau of Planning that in 1960, its construction was understood to “be the boundary between white and Negro communities”3; and the destruction of Herndon Homes, Atlanta’s last complex of low income homes in “an ambitious initiative to replace the projects with mixed-income communities—read: more profitable development.4 These stories, and others, demonstrate the ways in which the perception, conception, and lived experience of a city affects its overall spatial production—in the case of the neo-liberal city, extension and fragmentation.
1 Auge, Marc. Howe, John. trans. Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity. Verso Publishing: London UK. 1995. 2 Castells, Manuel. The Rise of the Network Society: The Information Age: Economy, Society, and Culture. John Wiley and Sons: Hoboken NJ, 2009. 3 Davis, Mike. Morris, Roberts, photography. City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles. Verso Publishing: London, 1990. Pg 238. 4 Sassen, Saskia. “When the City Itself Becomes a Technology of War.” Theory, Culture, and Society. 200: 27:33. 5 Easterling, Keller. “Interchange and Container: The New Orgman. Perspecta, Vol. 30, Settlement Patterns (1999) pp. 112-121. 6 7
Ibid, my emphasis. Ibid
rodney a. bell [ selected projects ]
1 McCaffrey, Shannon. “Atlanta Suburbs Move to Secede.” The Associated Press. 8 January 2010. <http://www.goupstate.com/article/20100108/ARTICLES/100109789> 2 Monroe, Doug. “Where It All Went Wrong.” Atlanta Magazine. 1 August 2012. <http://www.atlantamagazine.com/features/story.aspx?ID=1742459> 3 ibid 4 Davis, Joeff. “Herndon Homes Demolition.” Creative Loaing: Atlanta. 19 February 2010. < http://clatl.com/freshloaf/archives/2010/02/19/photo-of-the-day-herndon-homes-demolition>
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The Industrial Age heralded a transformation of cities from mere commercial nodes into centers of production: material production, economic production, and social production. Infrastructure--particularly transport infrastructure--plays into this productive triad, providing a link between industrial and social production. London’s first subway--the Metropolitan Railway, played a key part in this urban transition, allowing citizens to move, for the first time, fluidly through, within, and without the metropolis. Furthermore, it opened a new dimension to the metropolis--the underground. This newly unearthed space provided a separation from the societal norms enforced on the street and a general escape from the surface of the city. This descent offered new phenomenlogical understandings and inhabitations of the metropolis.
125’
250’
500’
1000’
Paddington
Edgware Road
Street Level
Street Level
Its retroactive implementation generated fluid relationships between infrastructure, public space, and the private realm.
Edinburgh
Platform Level
london underground: territorial infrastructures ilway great northern ra
ra
ilw
ay
York
Cornell University_Design Seminar: Taming Nature no
Professor Laila Seewang at
ter
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a d e
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rn railway
Manchester
way
Yarmouth
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eastern
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Mezzanine Level
Platform Level
Paddington Station
Opened: 1863 Connections: Great Western Railway
[ 84 ]
Edgware Road Station
Opened: October 1, 1863 Connections: District + Hammersmith & City Lines
Baker Street
Kingâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Cross / St. Pancras
Farringdon
Street Level
Euston Square Station Opened: 1863
Entry Mezzanine Level
Street Level Street Level
Great Portlandt St. Opened: January 10, 1863
Mezzanine Level Lower Mezzanine Level
Mezzanine Level
Platform Level Platform Level
Farringdon Station
Opened: January 10, 1863 Connections: Circle + Hammersmith & City Lines
Metropolitan Platform Level
Platform Level
Baker Street Station
Opened: 1863 Connections: Circle + Hammersmith & City Lines
Kingâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Cross / St. Pancras
Opened: 1863 Connections: Great Northern Railway, Circle, Hammersmith & City, Northern, Picadilly,Victoria Lines Lower Platform Level
rodney a. bell [ selected projects ]
London Metropolitan Railway [ 85 ]
Cities are often conceived within urban geographical discourse as the tangible or material aspects of more abstract global flows of capital, resources, production, labor, and information. But the term citiesâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;once understood in this way, still seems too broad to merit analysis as something tangible. Although the city acts as a geographical node along this global matrix, perhaps the more formalized and perceivable meeting of global and local forces is the shipping port. It is within these infrastructural sites where capital in the form of commodities is transferred seamlessly from transnational locations into regional infrastructures. Taking Clare Lystersâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; notion of exchange and its propagation across space as an asymptotic meeting of global and local flows, exchange occurs here in these oftendetached locations within or beyond the cityâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s core. These detached and sprawling exhangescapes improve the efficiency of transshipment and allow for shorter turnover times as vessels enter and leave port. However, what are the larger ramifications and implications of resource flows constituting an other landscape.
+
port cities: terratorial infrastructure Cornell University_territorial infrastructure
professor: neeraj bhatia One cannot deny that the toxicity, disease, and general filth that accompany these industrial uses is displaced, creating more sanitized urban environments in the places where these uses were concentrated before. However, moving beyond these more pragmatic aspects, how is this smoothing over of the process territorial rationalization affecting the way in which societies understand the infrastructures which scaffold their means of consumption?
[ 86 ]
To what extent do these global processes begin to order local urban development, land use, and ecological flow? These questions and many surround the proliferation of such exchange-scapes In order to understand the effects of these sites propagated both globally and locally, one must first understand the logistics of the processes governing the implementation of container ports. These highly complex spatial and formal schemas are driven by the logistics of moving a very simple unit of storage—the standardized shipping container. Containerization, or the shift in shipping logistics from bulk-storage—storage of commodities in larger quantities—to the use of the standardized shipping container changed the face of maritime shipping and, more importantly, the configuration of the modern metropolis.
Even beyond the immediate environs of the port, canal and channel depths govern the flow of goods, local revenues, shipment costs, and vessel capabilities. Figure 3A illustrates the relationship between canal depths and cargo capacity. Often ports become obsolete when the canals have not been dredged to accommodate the larger vessels, which operate as primary carriers and feeders. The larger the vessel size, the more cargo capacity, which generates more efficient revenues for the carriers and higher revenues for the local municipalities that govern channels and canals. Therefore, even the simplest territorial logics are coupled to economic and logistical flows. As such, there is a constant demand for re-dredging in order to both maintain depths and deepen these conduits for expanded operations.
_Containerization and the Development of Infrastructural Exchange Globalization existed in varied forms throughout history—perhaps its earliest iteration is the Silk Road leading from Europe to Eastern Asia. Early trade routes, however, differ from modern globalization in that they merely linked and opened markets. Modern globalization—through a fluidity of capital and commodity seems to dissolve or deemphasize national boundaries, creating what Saskia Sassen calls “a transnational urban system.”1 The integrated waterfront seaports of historic port cities were rendered obsolete by the invention of the standardized shipping container by Malcom McLean in the 1966 and the subsequent logicsitical standardization of transport and transshipment across space. As the logistics of these movements became more efficient and fluid, expanded infrastructures were required to accommodate the transfer and movement of commodities across space. A comparison of New York City’s system of vessel slips and the surrounding port industries in 1899 seem miniscule in comparison to the Port of Elizabeth terminal in New Jersey. The required space for exponentially larger vessels, larger surface areas for storage and transfer, and greater integration into these infrastructural exchangescapes led to the displacement of ports from the city-proper into more detached locations where conditions can be controlled or constructed.
Transshipment—or the loading and unloading of containers at port—has been perhaps the most rationalized element of this process. The standardization of storage bays within vessels, the gantry cranes which move containers around the terminal, the transfer trucks and rail beds are all designed according to the shipping container. Keller Easterling calls such spatial configurations of rational components and rational flow organizational space. This interface, seen more broadly in Figure 4 and more closely in Figure 5 is highly mechanized and standardized such that turnaround times for vessels can be calibrated to the shortest durations. Because each vessel operates on a route, which is understood in terms of days/hours at/between ports, these stoppages for transfer constitute friction within the larger process. Territorial integration of flows—either by consolidating storage yards, implementing dedicated rail and vehicular transfer corridors, and more efficient turnover times—seeks to lubricate such frictions.
The map illustrates the complexity of maritime shipping networks. The overlay of shipping routes and the economic and physical size of global ports reveals infrastructural sectors—or territories—at the global scale. There are clearly territories of high connectivity and those, which are strangely outside of the network—southern Africa and western South America. Furthermore, the map reveals—without statistics—those countries that lead in importing and exporting. This extensive network operates not simply on those cities which dominate the cultural imagination with regards to capital accumulation—New York, Tokyo, London, et cetera. Rather, the cities that lead in exporting and importing are second-tier cities— cities that are situated within the network according to their distributive infrastructures (Houston, New Orleans, Rotterdam, Guangzhou, et cetera). Therefore, place within the global network relies less on historical significance and more upon a certain cities situation within the network: cities of consumption, cities of production, cities of distribution, et cetera. This global, regional, and local territorial configuration of flows creates spatial hierarchies at various scales. Moving from the global flows of commodities to that of the regional, one begins to understand how these goods are distributed from the more prominent intermediate ports (Houston, Guangzhou, Rotterdam) to gateway hubs (Savannah, Charleston, Jacksonville, et cetera) and on to the hinterlands of such cities for distribution. Figure 3 illustrates these processes and the hierarchialization of the movement of goods through territories. Typically, ports will be located adjacent to or have dedicated connections to regional and national infrastructure—railways and interstate highways. As goods arrive, they are processed, stored, and transferred to distribution centers—usually located in the city’s hinterlands—from which they depart to both local and non-local destinations.
1 Sassen, Saskia. “Introduction: Whose City Is It?: Globalization and the Formation of New Claims” Globalization and its Discontents. The New Press: 1998, pg. XXVI
rodney a. bell [ selected projects ]
The vessels themselves have witnessed unprecedented changes since their standardization along with the containers in the 1950s. Figure 6 illustrates how, over the course of about 60 years, these vessels have become exponentially larger. Because of these sizes—largely driven by the physical constraints of the Panama and Suez Canal(s), metropolitan ports have had to relocate to peripheral—or even remote—environments to find sufficient space for the movement, docking, and transshipment of such vessels. Figure 7 illustrates the means through which cargo is moved both within, onto, and off of the vessel. Utilizing onboard bridges and cranes, these ships are able to assist port infrastructure in the offloading and loading of containers—further decreasing turnover rates. These components, which compose a larger logistical network, are all embedded with the same code of “commonality of measurement.”1 Beyond coding its components, however, the process of moving goods—in containers—codes entire territories of exchange. As ports become more efficient in transshipment, they require larger surface areas for storage and incorporate more auxiliary infrastructure. The contemporary culmination of this phenomena is perhaps, ironically, Porto do AcuBrazil. Larger than the entire island of Manhattan, this 90 square kilometer superport, designed to serve the emerging oil industries around Brazil’s Santos Basin, will also incorporate industrial production, materials refinement, petroleum refinement, and manufacturing. Perhaps more notable is the conflation of national interests embedded in this project. Corporate investments from China, Italy, France, the United States, and Brazil have all been recorded. Even more novel, this city is located in a relatively remote—but strategic—location, emphasizing the shift from historical to global/ logistical place. Such examples will only proliferate as global flows become more refined and rational. However, there exists a need to critically examine this development in terms of its broader implications in order to better ascertain what opportunities they present for addressing these larger issues.
1 Hein, Caroloa. “Port Cityscapes: a networked analysis of the built environment.” Port Cities: Dynamic Landscapes and Global Networks. Routledge: London & New York, 2011. Pg. 9.
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trans-scalar surface of flow
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port of savannah shipping routes
manufactures
mineral fuel raw materials foodstuffs
surface of flow_port of savannah shipping routes (source:Ports georgia ports authority) are inherently sites of imports by sect or
1997 + 1980 + 1970 + asia
import
s
1960 +
export
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w. europe
n. america
n asia
easter
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a afric
rodney a. bell [ selected projects ]
extension where abstract economic, political, and geographical forces converge and are rendered tangible. In the abstract neo-liberal networks of flow, geographical location matters less than â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;placeâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; within the network. There is a constant dialogue through scalar inflections of this network. The port and its extended infrastructure of shipping lanes and auxillary sites inscribe these flows from the scale of the globe to the scale of the site and its systems. [ 89 ]
garden city terminal
savannah/hilton-head international airport
This terminal, the largest singlearea port in the United States, operates purely on container transfer. With 400 acres of container storage, 1.4 million square feet of warehousing, and 10,000 feet of quays, this operation is an economic necessity to Savannah.
ocean terminal
Serviced by two rail providers, the Ocean Terminal handles container, raw materials, and heavy equipment freight. This terminal can also accept military vessels, when required.
east coast terminal
Since its opening in 1981, the terminal has fallen into various states of disuse but has recently been purchased and rennovated in keeping with Port Savannahâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s larger goals of expansion.
south carolina pilotâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s house
Larger vessels, especially of the container dimensions, are piloted through the channel by river captains. These operators are based out of this facility on Elba Island and rendevous with vessels at the outer marker to initiate the approach.
cockspur/elba island
This geographical divide between the north and (decommissioned) south channels is marked by the Cockspur Lighthouse at the extreme northeastern edge of the Elba Island. Only the North Channel is dredged and navigable by larger container vessels.
savannah city proper
approach breakwaters
These two jetties protect the dredged entrance from ocean erosion and mark the entrance to the north channel. The southern jetty is submerged and the northern jetty is partially submerged during high tide.
outer marker
Ships preparing for the river approach into Port Savannah hold at the outer marker where River Pilots will rendevous and board in order to safely guide each vessel through the channels into the port, where tug-boats finalize its docking at the quay.
georgia savannah
hunter army airfield
savannah river approach dredged channel
Channles are often dredged to 14-16 meters and increase the perimeter boundary of the port, thereby increasing quay-lengths
warehouses quay-side transhipment
petroleum storage auxillary quays
at intermediate ports, fuel is stored both from transhipment and for refueling purposes
these are often used for docking temporarily or for repairs
administration
the loading and unloading of containers occurs at the main quays with the use of gantry cranes
rail corridors
rail corridors--either dedicated or integrated-allow shipments to be transported to other distribution centers--either locally or non-locally.
typical port systems/components service corridors
[ 90 ]
service roads allow transport vehicles into the port for both loading and loading of shipments.
administration buildings are central to operations and act as a billboard for each portâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s holding company
Utilizing the Port of Savannah as a case Study, the material meeting of global flows is teased out through the drawing of these systems. Propagated across urban and geographical territories, these infrastructures make a considerable mark on the ecological, social, and economic contexts through which they are manifest. These territories of operation represent the confluence of interest that mark global urbanization: economics, politics, ecology, and culture.
weyerhaeuser paper mill
georgia power_plant kraft
atlantic wood industries
imperial sugar refinery
garden city terminal
GAF roofing & shingles materials
southeast marine services
nustar asphault & concrete international paper company
great dane limited_trailer
port of savannah plan
BASF chemicals
southern states chemical
tosco corporation
standard concrete
genstar gypsum
BASF chemicals
southern states chemical
eastern terminal
ocean terminals
colonial terminals
savannah steel
colonial terminals
rodney a. bell [ selected projects ]
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â&#x20AC;&#x153;The future is periurban. We must stop considering the hinterland as an indescribable horror, as an illegitimate and residual part of the cityâ&#x20AC;? -G. Martinotti
Rodney A. Bell Cornell University M.Arch II 1813 Hasbrouck Apartments Ithaca, New York 14850 USA e. rodneybell.arch@gmail.com p. 678.895.6709