Garden Alley _ Streetscape Territories

GARDEN ALLEY A N

A L T E R N A T I V E

D E V E L O P E M E N T

F O R

R E D

H O O K

by Edoardo Tadini

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GARDEN ALLEY A reflection paper by Tadini Edoardo

International Master of Architecture - Architecture & Sustainabinity Master Dissertation Studio 2017/18 : Red Hook Prof. dr. Kris Scheerlinck

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(imm): https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Irene%27s_Sediment_in_New_York_Harbor.jpg 4

Table of content 1_ INTRODUCTION -Streetscape Territories -Master dissertation - International -Abstract -Research questions

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2_ RED HOOK -Observations and reflections -Community involvement -Behaviourism

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3_STUDY -Geography -Historical background -Nature and humans -Layers of history

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4_EXPOSING OPINIONS -Red Hook today -Biomes of Red Hook -Discontinuities in the urban fabric

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5_AN ANALYTIC APPROACH -Discontinuities value -Discontinuous pattern 1 -Discontinuous pattern 2 -Discontinuous pattern 3 -Discontinuous pattern 4 -Discontinuous pattern 5 -Small scale discontinuous interactions -Contextual map of pattern’s analysis

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6_PROJECT ELEMENTS -Re-writing the landscape -Urban strategy -Building design -Levels of collectivity -Landscaping design

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7_REFLECTIONS AND CONCLUSIONS -Considerations on the project -Conclusions

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8_BIBLIOGRAPHY, SITOGRAPHY, ICONOGRAPHY

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INTRODUCTION

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INTRODUCTION

Master dissertation

International

This volume describes the architecture graduating project of students at the Faculty of Architecture, KU Leuven, campus Sint Lucas, Gent. The assignment focuses on Valentino Park, area inthe town of Red Hook, New York, USA. It tackles several important topics that currently apply to the Red Hook. During the research week in November 2017, many lectures and sessions took place among the students and several stakeholders as part of the common streetscape project.

The KU Leuven, Faculty of Architecture offers a masters program on International architecture. students from all over the worls enrol in this program and work on a series of assignments at the campus of Brussels or Gent. This gives students the opportunity to share thoughts, ideas and works with people from different places and different cultures. For the master dissertation, the students could choose between several sites and thematic frameworks where their projects would be located. Some options to work in were New York, but also Gent and Brussels.

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The Streetscape This master dissertation is developed within the framework of the Streetscape Territories project and focuses on the Valentino park area in Red Hook, New York, USA. The Streetscape Territoties project is an initiative of Prof. Dr. Kris Scheerlinck, who describes this cultural event as it follows:

‘Streetscape Territories is a research which starts from the assumption that strategies applyed in urban or architectural scale can be defined by an approach which originates in the street, and by the related conditions of accessibility, permeability, proximity and productivity for its users. In between the two scales of project, architectural and urbanistic, we have the intermediate scale, which is responsible of the design and research domain. The main thesis of the Streetscape is that urban space, from the domestic environment to the urban conformation, can be perceived as a sequence of collective spaces, containing different levels of collective use which are defined by multiple physical, cultural or territorial boundaries.’

The aim of the streetscape research consists in building up an accurate knowledge of different urban patterns starting from buildings façades. Different people shape their cities in different ways, following their culture, but they all respond to a common pattern of human social behavior which, of course, takes shape following the human scale and so gets translated in the rhythm, openings and transparency of city’s façades. The Street Scape research, in other terms, investigates the material traces of human’s social and cultural behavior on the architecture of their own cities. By understanding the language of architecture, it becomes possible to understand mind and personality of their creators.

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Abstract

Red Hook is a town with a proper identity: it is separated from the rest of Brooklyn by the highway, which acts as an element of separation in the landscape, and it is characterized by an inhomogeneous urban landscape, alternating housing with industrial buildings all around. This discontinuous urban landscape constitutes the very identity of the town itself; however, in most of the cases the transition from an area to the other is not regulated by a proper urban structure. The consequence of this is that the experience of the city becomes arrhythmic, irregular.

The character of Red Hook is not always visible in its streetscape or morphology, most of the times it is hidden in a chaotic amalgam of leftover buildings, a heritage of the industrial development. At the same time, this fragmentary urban structure is due to the original landscape of the wetlands, divided in a series of small islands that every now and then happen to be flooded by the tide of the Hudson river.

The aim of the project is to fill the discontinuity generated by the multiplicity of urban elements in a strategic area of Red Hook, a site in between the waterfront and the main strip, by maximising the result with the minimum effort of only one intervention which can correlate these two iconic fields. Moreover, the

chosen site presents several interesting aspects of the dynamics between the architectural reality and the use that people make of the space. The project, consisting in the renewal of a building and a park, acts as an ‘urban glue’ between the surrounding areas, it places them into direct communication with a wise study of the flows, it reactivates abandoned areas that still have potential. Finally, it highlights the streetscape of the city, with its structure of openings and architectural volumes: an aspect of the urban pattern of Red Hook that represents its very identity.

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Research Questions

What is the true identity of Red Hook?

Why is Red Hook so fragmented?

Is this inhomogeneity in the urban pattern noxious?

Is it possible for a design process to solve a fragmentary urban situation while keeping the differences?

Can buildings from an outdated industrial reality be still urbanistically efficient?

Can any form of intervention be at the same time practically effective and sustainable for the urban and cultural background?

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RED HOOK

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RED HOOK

Observations and reflections

Red Hook presents its proper identity as a neighbourhood of contradictions, it has typical fields and buildings but it lacks an identity independent enough to link them, it has several points of interest but they are not coordinated between each other. At first glance it is perceivable that the town has a large potential and many things occur in different corners, but they are not yet visible. People in the streets behave as if they were aware of this complexity, and the current situation shines not through buildings or structures but through the citizen’s social behaviour.

Red Hook gives, urbanistically speaking, the impression of being a periphery while its social life moves far more dynamically. The streets are cohabited by a multitude of different realities: inhabitants having a walk, young workers, busy people quickly crossing the road because they already know where they are going, as if we were in Manhattan when we are not. It would be appropriate to state that Red Hook is emancipated ideally but not actively, in the souls of the citizens but not in the buildings of the town itself.

The different quarters of the town describe a fragmented urban fabric, in which we can perceive a logic within every fragment but not a global continuity which would make all

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Community involvement

of them deal with each other.

The case of Red Hook is significant because the community involvement is at the same time the cause and the solution of this fragmentation. People shaped the town this way and people will always keep developing it in the same direction: the challenge now is to redirect this necessary development in a positive way. The best option might be tutoring the local identity, however what can exactly be considered identity? The fragmentation of the neighbourhood had been caused by historical events that shaped the town, and this is a problematic reality, as well as proper of the identity of Red Hook. Hence, a plausible solution might be to maintain the fragmentation while mediating the relationships between the parts.

The goal is to create a project able to mediate the discontinuity while preserving it and, at the same time, to suggests to citizens a new architectural model, both respectful of local identity and not resulting in mere plagiarism of Manhattan’s urban textile. The risk of Manhattanism (1. Rem Koolhaas, 1978) is an actual reality as practically all the investors come from the island; this term indicates the mindset of the people themselves and, since people are the first actors of a city’s development and growth, the influence of Manhattanism is a certitude.

As demonstrated by the urban restoration plan of Renzo Piano in Harlem (2. Piano 2016), not only buildings but the appearance of entire quarters can drastically change the attitude of people towards the place itself (3. Piano, 2005). At the starting point, just observing the ‘amount of care’ that people have for portions of public space is an indicator of the social ingenuity because, even if they are not aware of their actions, the sum of them follows a scheme, a comprehensive plan that designates a collective consciousness (4. Gehn and Svalle, 2013). This happens because the experience through which a person knows and perceives a space is divided into two phases, the first one is the prejudice or first impression, it’s the most instantaneous and of impact, and the cumulative knowledge, which is gradual and which characterize, after the prejudice, the effective and deep knowledge of the place and in the end will bring the perceiving organism to adaptation (5. Turri, 2006).

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Behaviorism

Behaviourism(6. Skinner, 1930) is a systematic approach to the understanding of human and animal behavior. It assumes that all behaviors are either reflexes produced by a response to certain stimuli in the environment, or a consequence of that individual’s history, mostly including inheritance, but anyway they focus primarily on environmental factors.

Not everyone is voted to a socially sustainable behavior, the human being develops different grades of sensibility to the place he lives in, and this sensibility doesn’t forcedly or always bring to a sustainable lifestyle.

The environment people live in is the main responsible, it is the “theater” in which we all recite the script of life, both the landscape and the climate, and the human being is at the same time the actor who changes the setting of the stage and the spectator of his own track.

The inhabitant of a place owns it (by latin habitare-habere) both materially and as a knowledge, and the role he plays in the landscape comes by the act of becoming a spectator, by his taking consciousness of himself. Becoming spectator means an estrangement from themselves, a doubling (7. Turri, 2006 / Dal Sasso and Pandakovich, 2013).

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(1) refers to the final urban stages of the process of transformation under pressure. Cities create metropolitan expressions through density.

(2) Columbia University project, inaugurated on monday 24 October 2016 (3) Renzo Piano in an interview in the italian newspaper La Repubblica, 22 November 2005 (4) How to study public life, Jan Gehl and Brigitte Svarre (2013) (5) Il Paesaggio Come Teatro, Turri E. (2006) (6) approach to psycology developed by John Watson at the beguinning of 900 and ultimated by B.F. Skinner in 1930, based on the assumption that the explicit behavior of the individual is the only element of the entire psycology being scientifically able to be studyed using the method stimulus(ambience) and answer(behavior) as dyrectly observable by the researcher.

(7) Il Paesaggio Come Teatro, Turri E. (2006) Saper vedere il paesaggio, Pandakovich D. e Dal Sasso A. (2013)

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STUDY

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STUDY

Geography “Named so for its red clay soil and the distinctive shape of the peninsula, the marshy area of Red Hook remained largely underdeveloped through the 18th century. The town is located in the bay of New York, it faces New Jersey from the opposite shore of the Hudson River estuary. Since their arrival, boats first have to enter the Lower Bay, located between Sandy Hook and Coney Island, then cross the tight passage between Fort Wadsworth and Fort Hamilton to finally enter the Upper Bay. In the same bay, it is possible to have access to the main urban centers of the region, such as Manhattan Island, Jersey City, Staten Island and Brooklyn, where Red Hook is located.

From there, it is possible then to go even upper, at left through the Hudson River and reach Fort Lee and Yonkers, or at right through the East River and head to the Queens and Bronks. The estuary suffered greatly from pollution due to the industrialization in the New York Harbor and port but is now considered to be recovering, as shown by data of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Wetlands are important for several biological aspects, they provide habitat for fish, shellfish and plants of commercial and recreational importance. They are also important for the geological conformation because they hold and slowly release flood water and snow melt, recharge groundwater, recycle nutrients and provide recreation opportunities for people. The whole area is identified as Tidal Wetlands, that includes all lands under tidal waters, and Littoral zones. The elevation of the peninsula is lowlying, especially along the waterfront where ground elevations are mainly below 10 feet above the sea level, this makes Red Hook prone to flooding� (1. Dan Walsh, 2014).

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(imm): https://landsat.gsfc.nasa.gov/new-york-city-1860/

Historical background “Historically used for manufacturing and industrial uses along the waterfront, Red Hook has been founded as the dutch village of Roode Hoek in 1636. It was one of the first areas to be settled in Brooklyn but it, unfortunately, remained undeveloped until the construction of the Atlantic, Erie and Brooklyn Basins.

These artificially enclosed areas have been designed to keep water level unaffected by tidal changes and allow large ships to dock. In the 1840s, the peninsula began to grow into one of the busiest shipping centers in the United States, the success of the pier infostructure led by Colonel Daniel Richards, a local developer for the first steam grain elevator of New York, to petition the city of Brooklyn to lay a street grid around the Atlantic Basin. This action connected Red Hook’s waterfront to the rest of southern Brooklyn in 1847. Between the civil war and the early half of the 20th century, Red Hook’s piers received and unloaded cargo from all over the world. The neighborhood hosted thousands of workers, mainly Italian and Irish American immigrants. To serve this population, the Red Hook Houses were constructed in 1938 for families of dockworkers and longshoreman, this has been one of the first and largest federal housing projects in the United States under president Roosevelt. Prior to the construction of these houses, thousands of workers were living in row houses in the area. During the 19th century, the Erie Basin Iron Works manufactured steam engines and its location close to the waterfront on Van Dyke St made it possible for ships to undergo machinery repairs and hull servicing simultaneously.

In 1908 the New York Dock company constructed large concrete warehouses on Imlay st., setting the stage for similar built structures in the area. Nearby, paint companies established operations in the open spaces near Clinton, Columbia and Ostergo streets where they were removed from the residential area.

There are currently two city landmarks in Red Hook that reflects its history, the Brooklyn Clay Retort and Fire Brick Works Storehouse and the Sol Goldman Pool at the Red Hook Play Center, built in 1936 to serve the area’s working-class residents. By 1940’s the shipping industries showed a significant decline due to inadequate infrastructure system and to the advent of cargo containerization. As many firms moved to New Jersey, the city of New York acquired this unoccupied land in order to revitalize waterfront and port” (2. Dan Walsh, 2014).

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Nature and humans The original territory of formation of Red Hook appears like a mosaic of peninsulae and estuaries, land and water intersect for the whole length of the shore suggesting a divided nature used to the changing of the floods, used in having an unconstant map, uncertain boundaries of the different pieces of its mosaic.

All towns grow up and develop in a mutual interaction with nature, they depend on it for the geometrical conformation but mostly for its character, for the genius loci (3. Schulz, 1976). Very often, we talk about how a building or a territory “behave”, we feel the need to humanize spaces we live in order to properly understand them and interact with.

The etymology of the word territory, in its original semantic meaning of anthropic geography, comes from the latin territorium which indicates “a social artifact derived by human processes of territorialisation”(4.

Loescher, 2007); from this definition, two subdefinitions emerge as, first, territory inhabited and modified by humans (5. R.D. Sack, 1986) and territory as syntagma, a composition of geological, ecological, anthropical and biological elements (6. C. Raffestin 1981). So there is a remarkable dichotomy of nature and culture which emerges from the dictionary, also proved by the etymology of culture, from Latin colere, which means “cultivating, taking care of” and implies the necessary implicit linking between the anthropic and natural domain.

The interdependence of the two elements is also attested by Carlos Martìs Arìs “geographical elements establish the etymological root of urban facts”(7. Arìs, 2005, p.56) who highlight, in particular, the temporal primacy of nature in the process. The territory becomes territorium as soon as a person sees it and starts the cognitive process by expressing a judgment; from this moment, the inhabitants of New York perceive the natural predisposition of the wetlands for homing boats and build up piers. Always Arìs says “to make up a public space out of every place ... the configuration of the place itself must be able to home the assigned task” (8. Arìs, 2005, p.56). This dynamic recalls the greek amphitheater, for which greeks were used to set up the steps for the public using the existing slope of hills.

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Layers of history

“In architecture, the research of the etymon, from the etymological root of the shape, can show the presence of deep and significative relationships between architectures since that moment considered incompatibles” (9.

Arìs, 2005, p.37). With this sentence, Carlos Martì Arìs encourages researchers to go further in their observations of the site and not to stuck into a superficial data mining.

The history of a place can be rebuilt layer by layer but, to reach a complete result, it’s necessary to see the “meaning” of a building, its etymology. Once tracked all the components, the different layers ordered separately in time will result just as a continuity in the flow of events. The programmatic list of happenings melts into the πάντα ῥεῖ (everything flows, transforms) of the greek philosopher Eraclides (10) or, as Italo Calvino would metaphorically say in its masterpiece “the invisible cities”, “In late age you arrive to Isidora... and wishes are already memories” (11. Arìs, 2005, p.22).

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(1)-(2) Existing conditions and brownfields analysis. Red Hook, Brooklyn. Director Dan Walsh, environmental remediation office under mayor Bill deBlasio (2014) (3) In modern age, expression employed in architecture to define a fenomenological form of approach to study the environment by following the interactions between the place and its own identity (4) latin noun, neutral, 2nd declination (5) A human group, in a natural environment, develops thanks to the modificationt it applies to the ambience, thus the natural ambience gains anthropological value and gets the connotation of territory (6) Territory as combination of 13 elements, divided in three groups : altitude, atmosphere, sweet water basins, shores, sea/ocean, morphology, soil features, rocks, earthquakes, volcanos (ecological elements) greenry, fauna (biological elements) mankind and its artifacts (anthropological elements).

(7) La cèntina e l’arco. Pensiero, teoria, progetto in architettura. Carlos Martìs Arìs (2005) p.56 (8) La cèntina e l’arco. Pensiero, teoria, progetto in architettura. Carlos Martìs Arìs (2005) p.56 (9) La cèntina e l’arco. Pensiero, teoria, progetto in architettura. Carlos Martìs Arìs (2005) p.37 (10) Eraclides thought that the origin of everything, the ἀρχή, was the in the nature of fire as everything constantly transforms, constantly flows, as the fire itself.

(11) La cèntina e l’arco. Pensiero, teoria, progetto in architettura. Carlos Martìs Arìs (2005) p.22

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(imm): https://www.edizionisur.it/sotto-il-vulcano/17-11-2017/ultima-uscita-brooklyn-cinquantanni-doposulle-tracce-hubert-selby-jr-quartiere-ritratto-nel-suo-romanzo/ 29

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EXPOSING OPINIONS 31

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EXPOSING OPINIONS

Red Hook today “By 1990, high crime and poverty were pervasive so Brooklyn Community Board submitted in 1994 a plan for community regeneration, housing, transport and waterfront access. Nowadays, several land-use developments including IKEA, Fairway Market and the Brooklyn cruise terminal have begun to shape Red Hook as a destination neighborhood. Recent developments in Red Hook has built on the area’s industrial roots but has also brought a new dynamic of commercial and residential life. Major developments as IKEA, replaced a 19th-century working dry dock. Fairway supermarket has also added to a new development scheme in Red Hook. Located in a civil-war era building constructed by William Beard in the 1870’s, Red Hook Stores Warehouses originally served shipping activities in the Erie Basin. The property and the surrounding area underwent a mixed-use rezoning in 2002. Greg O’Connell then purchased the property from the NYC Economic Development Corporation and restored the building to accommodate the Fairway Market and residential units on the upper floors. The site was largely

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underutilized for many years. Fairway Market opened in 2006. Across Van Brunt St, Pier 41, also known as Merchant Stores, consists of two large brick warehouses. Originally built in 1873, it was recently rehabilitated and now offers spaces for light manufacturing and commercial business enriching the net of local artisans and supporting the preservation of the historical industrial built character. Lastly, the Atlantic Basin remains one of the most iconic images of the working waterfront in Red Hook for 165 years.

Originally built to accommodate large ships crowded out of Manhattan’s waterfront, it was also the site of the first steam grain elevator in the Port of New York, processing bulk grains, moving through the Erie Canal.

Today, it is the site of Brooklyn Cruise Terminal on Pier 12, accommodating ships such as the Queen Mary 2 and the Caribbean Princess, as well as the Brooklyn Container Terminal. On October 29 of 2012, Hurricane Sandy and the resulting storm surge flooded nearly the entire Red Hook peninsula, leaving houses without electricity and rendering many of the business out of service� (1. Dan Walsh, 2014).

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Biomes of Red Hook Taking in exam the classical model of town, with a distinct center, periphery and countryside, it is remarkable how, the development tracks a border between city and countryside by distinguishing them as separate but complementary realities, one watching at the other with a different perspective. The different biomes are distinct but related. The situation changes in the ‘contemporary town’, the countryside becomes an element of public design while the urban peripheries suffer for the invasion of infostructures and factories. In modern times, the border between the two original urban dimensions blurred into a superimposition of compact centers and widespread urbanization, agricultural and industrial areas, large shopping centers and places of leisure (2. Arìs, 2005). The same scheme, as deeply heterogeneous urban fabric, is already contained in “Les trois ètablissements humains” of Le Corbusier (3.

Le Corbusier, 1945). Since its foundation, also Santiago De Compostela has been a precursor of this urbanistic trend with its rueiros (4), appendages of the urban center that town was launching towards the countryside to look for a relationship. Red Hook is still treated more as periphery of Brooklyn than an independent center, biomes are distinct but not related to each other. If we refer to the contemporary urban scheme, the highway helps to highlight and to define the borders of Red Hook’s independent identity towards Brooklyn.

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Discontinuities in the urban fabric

The necessity felt by Bernard Huet (5. Huet, 1981) of thinking about the town as a succession of separated parts of city and territory “could have happened implicitly when, within wide regional and culturally homogeneous spaces, the two realities of town and countryside were separated. But today no urban project can take off from here...the most fertile way is to interpret the different parts reading them as the results of procedures of social interaction, which are formalized and become habitual through the transformations carried out by different subjects�

(6. Bernardo Secchi, 1986). In the context of the modern city, a relevant focus can be made upon the spaces of transition between these remaining fragments of the different urban patterns, derived by social procedures, which can be evident transitory elements such as roads, for sure, but not forcibly; in fact, the transition can be seen at all scales, from the urban one to the transition between a bench and trashcan. Transitory fields have a wide range of depth and form a fraction of space between two points; these make an actual difference in the experience that people will have about the whole structure.

The discontinuity theme is strictly related to behaviourism (7. Skinner, 1930), an architectural approach that borders on social psychology and investigates how the physical space can influence human behaviour both positively and negatively.

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The modern cityscape is no more differentiated in its main fields, as were town and countryside for the ‘classic town’, but presents a series of discontinuities among all the urban fabric. The new urban pattern is based on isolated and convex objects, which generate a continuity in the spatial void, but without determining it (8. Colin Rowe and Fred Koetter, 1978). Such attitude originates, apparently, from the need of a continuity in the void; however, it simply results in a stubborn and compulsive research of regularity. It is strongly detached from the urban prototypes of the classical culture, where the border between indoor and outdoor was so thin.

Roman architecture gave a tangible consistency to the air mass. With the Pantheon, we have a building which is nothing more than an auxiliary entity whose scope is to assert the continuity of the void from the inside to the outside, through the oculus on the dome, and vice versa. The same attention to the architectonical void is present through all the gothic architecture and renaissance; with the English Victorian style, this sensibility gets transposed into a modern shape with the Crystal Palace in Hyde Park, made of glass and steel. It is with the modernism and the CIAM (9) manifesto that this point of view gets twisted, the thirst for new shapes and innovative space conformations leads the perception of architects to corrupt the old dialogue between body and void and this, by consequence, reflects itself on the dialogue that each building establishes with the urban context. The previous interconnected continuity of architectural bodies and voids is here replaced by a continuous void littered with regular bodies. Urban fragmentation must not be seen exclusively as a negative factor, as for the current case of Red Hook, in which the plurality in the streetscape’s pattern actually creates the value of the place.

A praise to the variety in the urban textile is present in two ‘Dialogues’ of Plato, respectively the Republic (Πολιτεία) and the Laws (Νόμοι) (9. Plato, 390-360 b.C.). The philosopher expresses a critique to the urbanistic system adopted by Greeks: in fact, he believes that the homogeneity of the pòlis, organized in the net division of the three areas of the high city (ἀκρόπολις), low city (ἄστυ)

and periphery (χώρα), is, in terms of spatial organization and aesthetic component, an ‘inopportune solution of absolute regularity’ and ‘despicable, as a carrier of aesthetic unpleasantness’ (11. Plato, 390-360 b.C.). “Of an edifice or a place, still considered as single elements which can be listed, the events are reconstructed; in some case through an intelligent research...always leaving the structural ties between the archive and the inventory in the realm of implication. Today it looks like a project cannot exist without a certain quantity of paper and historical background. Inventory and biographical reconstruction support one another in a cumulative manner, in an explicit expression of the collective anguish regarding the loss of temporal continuity” (12. Bernardo Secchi, 1986).

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(1) Existing conditions and brownfields analysis. Red Hook, Brooklyn. Director Dan Walsh, environmental remediation office under mayor Bill deBlasio (2014) (2) La cèntina e l’arco. Pensiero, teoria, progetto in architettura. Carlos Martìs Arìs (2005) (3) Les trois ètablissements humains. Le Corbusier (1945) (4) “streets” in galician.

(5) Le Creusot, naissance et développement d’une ville industrielle 1782-1914. Bernard Huet (1981) (6) Progetto di suolo. Bernardo Secchi (1986) p.44 (7) see note (6) on p.13 (8) Collage city. Colin Rowe and Fred Koetter (1978) (9) ‘Congrès internationaux d’architecture moderne’, organization founded in 1928 and disbanded in 1959, responsible for a series of events and congresses arranged across Europe by the most prominent architects of the time, with the objective of spreading the principles of the Modern Movement (10) In its dialogues, Plato expresses to his friends philosophers a critic about Athen’s politic system, with also some reference to the urban asset; he ends up by hypotesize a model of ideal city, based on the three main activities in which, in his opinion, the different layers of greek’s society excell: philosphers, warriors, workers.

He difines this utopic politic theory as ‘φιλοσοφία περὶ τὰ ἀνθρώπινα’ (philosophy about human business).

(11) Dialogues. Plato (390-360 b.C.) (12) Progetto di suolo. Bernardo Secchi (1986) p.22

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ANALYSIS

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ANALYTIC APPROACH

Discontinuities’s value It is possible to analyze the entire urban fabric of the Red Hook, seeking for all the discontinuous segments of town but it would be impossible to develop an efficient and elaborated project-solution for every site.

Hence, an investigation about all the pros and cons is necessary for every one of the pointed areas. Following this analysis and the main three themes decided within the streetscape research, it becomes possible to determine where the most it is advantageous to develop an architectural strategy and moreover which kind of project is the case to prepare.

An intervention in the first area would represent a reclamation of the industrial field, the town would accept and develop the pier area instead of keeping it apart, as an emarginated corner. Developing the second area would complete the waterfront and at the same time connect it to the Van Brunt St, which would represent a winning choice because it would join together the two major poles of attraction, plus, it would help the town in combining the parts to shape a proper urban identity. Working in the third area would create a second waterfront, competing with the existing one, which would be easier to relate to Van Brunt St. Working on the fourth area would at the same time demarginalize the parks and the hook, so an intervention in here requires taking in consideration the hook as well. An intervention on the fifth area would actually help to welcome tourists coming from the subway to town and also reconnect Brooklyn to Red Hook.

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Discontinuous pattern 1 Van Brunt St, King St, Pioneer St, Conover St, Imlay St

There are different levels of communication between the buildings composing this block, starting from Van Brunt Street and going towards Conover street, the streetscape language changes drastically from a classic urban-center rhythm of properties and openings to a wide sense of abandonment and carelessness. The starting point is the strip of Red Hook and the ending one is represented by the fences of Pioneer Work. The coworking space keeps the characteristics of a well-cared city center facility but the surrounding context of the industrial port forces it to close itself into spartan steel fences covered with graffiti. Pioneer Work can be considered an appendix of Van Brunt street into an alien context, which belongs to a completely different urban biome and which causes it to look like a fortress, a fortress to protect something valuable from a careless environment. In terms of pourosity and openness, this transition leads from a rhythmic and porous streetscape to blind, impermeable walls. This characteristic is visible also on the bus parking on the other side of the road, closed into steel walls with barbed wire.

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King street

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King street

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Pioneer Work is a perfect example of discontinuity as it is a point of interest located at the border with the industrial district. The builders had to make a perimeter intervention to mediate the passage between a locus amoenus and the surrounding locus horridus. The solution is an easy painting on the boundary but it evidences a clear distinction in how people want the different areas to be perceived.

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Within its perimeter walls, Pioneer Works organizes indoor and outdoor spaces in a perfect balance. The indoor is designed as an outdoor, it is a public working space, and the park outside is vice versa organized as an indoor space. Here we find a bar, chairs, places to relax or play and the vertical elements of the greenery are arranged so to better suggest the domestic layout.

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Within its perimeter walls, Pioneer Works organizes indoor and outdoor spaces in a perfect balance. The indoor is designed as an outdoor, it is a public working space with all the necessary tools and facilities, and the park outside is vice versa organized as an indoor space. Here we find a bar, chairs, places to relax or play and the vertical elements of the greenery are organized so to better suggest the domestic layout.

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Discontinuous pattern 2 Coffe St, Feris St, Van Dyke St, Conover St

The area identifies, at different levels, the discontinuous relationship between Van Brunt Street and the waterfront and the fragmentation of the single parts of the waterfront between each other, so Louis Valentino park, Liberty warehouse and the food market. This discontinuous pattern is the richest one of opportunities for a successful project, following the listed themathics, both for the various articulation of the discontinuity in the urban grid, both for the geographical position in the context, both the extension relative to the surroundings. Coming from the strip, the first and main obstacle to transition is a block of old industrial buildings which had in origin the function of repairing laboratories for the ships, nowadays partially abandoned, partially employed as workshops. The block is inaccessible from pedestrians and it’s necessary to walk all the way around in order to reach the waterfront. Right after, a series of fences create a delimitation to the whole waterfront, forcing pedestrian to access from specific points in correspondence of Valentino park, the car access to the Liberty Warehouse site under the crane, the second car access aligned with Reed Street and a small pedestrian access from the food market. This big fence actually delimitates a huge brownfield partially used as parking, partially as dump yard.

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Cofee street

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Van Dyke street

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Conover street

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Discontinuous pattern 3 Beard St, Richard St

In this case, the discontinuity is not between two parts of the town directly connected but between the town center and the waterfront.

In correspondence to the crossroad with Richard street, the waterfront has an interruption due to a wide abandoned area, even if the works for building up a new mall right there already started. Even imagining the road once the mall will be finished, a sense of discontinuity persist because of the filo-industrial facilities on the opposite side of the road. In fact, even beyond the fact that citizen will probably be motivated by this new intervention to have better regard for the public space, the aesthetic problem of the bus deposit and car dump yards remains a consistent stimulus on people’s behavior. Following these considerations, the incoming construction of the mall will for sure bring unity in the waterfront but will not solve the discontinuity with the city center, for which, a renewal of the car dump yard would be on point.

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Discontinuous pattern 4 Halleck St, Columbia St

The field articulates in this case in an angle upon the convergence of Columbia street with Halleck street. The continuity of the landscape is here interrupted by the deposit backyard of the Ikea store, which follows an unusual angle with a protuberance. As the creation of the park is far antecedent, it is highly probable that this bizarre road conformation was already existing and not imputable to Ikea’s construction in 2005. This backyard’s discontinuity goes along with the abandoned silos allocated at the park’s border with the sea, they are in line and choke the entrance to the hook, nowadays a big abandoned area as well. This discontinuous pattern so doesn’t only fragment the sea shore but also represents the starting point of a much wider brownfield, for instance, for any future intervention on the hook it would be necessary to first take care of its main linking with the inland. Such crossroads result in being an important pin from which many areas depend.

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The whole Halleck St is designed between Ikea and the Red Hook Community Farm.

One side is transparent and harmonioulsy combines horizontal and vertical elements, the other side is a commercial block, its height cuts the horizon’s view.

Close to the end of the road, the deposit backyard of Ikea results to be not designed in any harmony with the context, it pops out of the streetscape border imposing itself with an unpleasant massivity and materials. Lots of graffiti confirm how its presence is perceived as intrusive and disturbing.

At the end of the road, the deposit shapes an unusual angle which acts as an unpleasant landscape barrier, it completely cuts the continuity with the park. Thus, the landscape is here perceived as the road finishes in a dead end.

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Discontinuous pattern 5 W9th St, Smith St, Garden St

This site shows the evident detachment of Red Hook from the rest of Brooklyn and already the subway station. Since the construction of the high way between 1940 and 1960, the presence of this imponent landscape barrier suggested a division between the two realities, it led to both negative, as the lack of a strong communication with the larger burgs and a social emargination, both positive consequences even if more in the recent years, such as the increased feeling of local community in Red Hook, the development of a proper identity. The represented urban intervention tracks the most efficient linking between the two realities following site observations and geographical considerations which it is possible to observe from the plan. The path also doesn’t follow in a straight way the W9th St to, at the same time, avoid the difficult road crossing point for pedestrians with Court St and exploit the unused and more open sites along Garnet St.

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The road conformation and the urban grid suggest articulating the linking between subway and the Red Hook center by using the access through Garnet St. W9th st., even if straight, as the ‘natural boundary’ of Court St which makes the transition more difficult. Moreover, the highway represents, since from far, an attractive power as dominant landmark so that it would be more effective for a project strategy to use it as a gate to enter the town, a guideline to understand which one is the correct direction to take in these chaotic quarters crossed in multiple points by busy and fast-driving roads. In this case, the triangle park site looks like a perfect site for a project that could involve the space underneath the highway and perfectly use the dominant landscape elements in this area; the space of air it creates, in between the blocks and the highway, suggests a changing in the urban rhythm, a pause from the tight silent walls to the wide, busy and noisy highway. Triangle Park, forced in this position, is literally a small urban oasis between two different types of urban busyness, one silent and one noisy but both somehow creating spatial restrictions. The presence of a series of leftovers lots in the direction of the canal, moreover, suggests a line of small interventions to escort the incoming visitors from the subway to town, something to already mediate the abrupt variations in the urban fabric.

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Site choice The area corresponding to the second discontinuity has been selected following the amount and quality of data produced by the streetscape analysis. The site already presents so many issues that the amount of façades studied was passing the number of other sites, plus, the street pattern of these roads is way much more variety than others.

Here there’s an alternation between the traditional housing and industrial streetscape, and most of the times they coexist in the same road, also just facing each other.

The choice is also motivated by the strategic position in the urban context of Red Hook, the site presents itself as a strategic connector between inland and waterfront and, more specifically, it puts in relation the two existing poles of attraction of the waterfront park and Van Brunt St. considered the main strip. As represented in the updated version of the biomes map, an intervention in the second discontinuous area would lead to the formation of a new urban conformation, no more composed by segregated clusters but organized in an harmonic plurality of centers, each one linked to the other but still separated.

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Avversion to viability and transparency With regard to the descriptive city planning, “the inventory activity is strictly linked to the denomination and designation...Perhaps there is something which links this effort to speak of the multiplicity of the real, preventing it from being illuminated by a rule of order, a theory, a narrative, to the idea of social fragmentation in which we are immersed” (1.

Bernardo Secchi, 1986). Condensing the detailed research of the streetscape analysis, and recomposing its parts in a three-dimensional form, gives us a model that makes easier to collect data about transition and fluxes, as for the interconnections between the different roads. Sections are extracted from this model from points of sensible interest, in order to highlight the aversion that this site has for viability and transparency, which leads to a total inconsistency of the voids.

This model of urban textile, already dominant in the industrial fields, is strongly criticized

by Colin Rowe and Fred Koetter in the book “Collage city” as it is also constitutes the root in the modern city, in primis New York.

In particular, the critique stresses on the fact that this cityscape is based on isolated and convex objects which generate a continuous void without any precise shape; this void becomes a simple background while the role of ‘figure’ is taken by buildings which result in being a series of isolated volumes, fragmented in the landscape (2. Rowe and Koetter, 1978). The new sensibility of urban planners, as said in previous pages, twisted the attention for an interconnected continuity of architectural bodies and voids by turning

it into a continuous void littered with regular bodies.

The extremism of the continuity of each element led to a discontinuity between the two.

In a way, this attitude of rationalising the parts of the town and creating a discontinuity is present also in the beloved classic architecture, that every architect refers to with nostalgia. “Architecture must relate to an exterior, reality which is opposite to the building that desctibes an interior...but architectural Classicism denies a priori this dialogue, by relying on purely abstract rules and producing buildings which all refer to an absolute principle” (3. Cusano Giannino, 1979); like the monad (4) of the philosopher Gottfried Leibniz (5), the original unique element constituting the whole, “it has no doors or windows, because if intimately we are all the same, then we don’t need to communicate anymore” (6. Cusano Giannino, 1979).

In the modern city, “we cannot be naive to the point of believing the issue can be solved by removing the town planning instrument, or just by abolishing some of its constitutive aspects. Less naive, but equally ineffective, is to believe one can ‘modify’ the character of that space by inserting, in its small, large, functional and symbolic interstices, new pieces of architecture which can recuperate, through quality, the sum of absence which characterize the peripheries and the large urban and territorial areas” (7. BernardoSecchi, 1986).

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(imm): https://graffica.info/ilustraciones-christoph-niemann/harbours-498x498/ 85

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Gf WORKING ENTRANCES ACTIVE AREA SEMI ACTIVE AREA MOSTLY UNACTIVE AREA PUBLIC BUILDING IN USE PUBLIC BUILDING NOT IN USE PRIVATE BUILDING

Contextual map of pattern’s analysis

TRANSPARENT BOUNDARY PROPERTY RHYTHM

“Nowadays, urban plans tell how cities are made but they don’t explain how it works” (8.

Bernardo Secchi, 1986).

The map highlights the distribution of openings in the total context and, at the same time, takes in consideration data on opaque and transparent borders to better identify at a small scale those dynamics that influence the complete urban pattern. The combination of these data draw a map of activities, not in the sense of functions, subordinated to the activities, but in an architectural sense, so resulted from the language expressed by the volumes themselves in the shape of porosity or impermeability. The importance of this analysis is that it actually tells how does this part of the city works for people and with people, so it defines the embryonal form of the most effective strategy that the project will follow, both in the urban context, both in the site itself. The map also introduces to the presence of a rhythmic succession in the volumetry of each block, volumetry which tells about the articulation of the streetscapes from the point of view of the pedestrian, so the perception of certain roads as more industrial and peripheric or as housing units.

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(1) Progetto di suolo. Bernardo Secchi (1986) p.22 (2) Collage City. Rowe and Koetter (1978) (3) La finestra e la comunicazione architettonica, Cusano G. (1979) (4) comes from the greek μονάς, which comes from μόνος (one, unique) it represents the ‘last indivisible unit’ in the philosophical production of Pitagora, Plato, Aristoteles, Giordano Bruno but it got mostly famous with the production of Gottfried Leibniz (5) Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz was a mathematician, philosopher, scientist, logical, glottoteta, diplomat, jurist, historian, german magistrate of soraba origin. (1646-1716) (6) La finestra e la comunicazione architettonica, Cusano G. (1979) (7) Progetto di suolo. Bernardo Secchi (1986) p.20-22 (8) Progetto di suolo. Bernardo Secchi (1986) p.22

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6.

Garden alley

PROJECT ELEMENTS 95

6

PROJECT ELEMENTS

Re-wrighting the landscape

The challenge represented by Red Hook’s urban situation is dealing with the ancestral urban fragmentation, inherited since the early 1800 development. “Despite what people normally believe, the transformation of an existing situation doesn’t imply, normally, a restriction but a stimulus. Such physical comparison, forced together with existing architecture, typical for the traditional city, is nowadays abandoned. And with this, also the community with experience is broken while it appears an eradication.” (1.

Arìs, 2005) “Through the concept of transformation, as soon as an intellectual approach, modern architecture is still able to link with tradition. So the object of transformation is not only a building, not only something material but it is more the relationships, that volatile part which is possible to see only at a certain level of sensibility. This approach, as Le Corbusier used in the Immeubles-Villas, requires a strong ability of abstraction. In this way, the project is located far from the individual invention-of-shape as if from the determinism of a purely imitative conception of old models. The ‘type’, as the project itself, for its own nature, refuses every defined and closed order but it is based on a constant openness to the system within it grows up and exist. At the same moment, we have to remember that the town

96

itself is seen in the contemporary culture as an always complete structure, that single projects contribute time by time to develop.”

(2. Arìs, 2005) “This ideal dialogue between continuity and transformation recalls the etymological meaning of the word ‘tradition’ (from Latin, tradere : to broadcast, put in relief, pursue an open process)” (3. Arìs, 2005) Palladio’s basilica in Vicenza is, actually, the result of the transformation of an existing mediaeval building with a collapsed front porch. He received in 1545 the commission for restoring the building while preserving the basement which was following the precedent function of the warehouse. The same approach appears in the project of the library of Paris from Boullèe, he actually proposed to build it in rue Saint Honorè by covering with a canopy a huge patio obtained by the space in between a series of existing buildings of different shape and dimension. At the end of the process, the existing façades appear incorporated to the library as side aisles or auxiliary rooms. Transforming with ingenuity a heterogeneous body defines an architecture which is characterized by the strength of its image and the unitarity of its character. In the town, we can already see such example in the Pioneer Work site and as well in St. Ann’s Warehouse, under the Brooklyn bridge. The same pattern is present in both sites, an old Warehouse divided in both indoor and outdoor space but not drastically separated. The design keeps homogeneity in itself and with the surrounding and blurs the boundaries between the conventional functions of private and public, indoor and outdoor. When possible, the design also blurs the boundary between site and surrounding.

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60,7

Existing situation

9,4

15

15,45

26,8

9,4

15

15,45

49,5

8,8

60,8 17,3

9,6

17,3

9,6

60,8

23,8

23,8

26,8

The site’s elements rotate around a group of scattered unused areas, organized on the shore slope so that they also result in a level-diversity collision. Geographically, the old crane appears to be the center of this spatial disorganization, which doesn’t respond nor to the centrality of the crane, nor to the position of the surrounding buildings, nor to the roads which cross the site drawing lines on the landscape. The area of interest is not well linked to its surroundings, the random disposition of the abandoned areas and parking translates itself into an approximative dialogue with the adjacent sites. As it emerges from the previous analysis, the qualities of the streetscape and the levels of use from people don’t match, the current situation is disharmonic and not responding to the architectural inputs, in terms of disposition of openings and volumetry. The map also investigates the openings of all the main buildings in the site and shows their load-bearing system according to site investigation, suggesting practical tips for any further project.

In the main building of interest, for example, the actual structure is composed by a dense grid of concrete slabs and pillars, insufficient if the purpose will lead to adding a new upper floor. It is also better not to consider the perimeter walls as fully reliable for a load distribution purpose.

67

21,2

49,5

98

8,8

1:500

21,2

152

60,7

26,3

5,5

67

99

79,5

Gf WORKING ENTRANCES ACTIVE AREA SEMI ACTIVE AREA MOSTLY UNACTIVE AREA PUBLIC BUILDING IN USE PUBLIC BUILDING NOT IN USE PRIVATE BUILDING

Urban strategy

TRANSPARENT BOUNDARY PROPERTY RHYTHM

By elaborating the data from the analysis of distribution, activities, openness, accesses and dominance of the space, the resulting strategy draws not only a viability solution but a scheme of social encounters, talking about different levels of possible human interaction. The issues related to the communication of the different parts of the site find a solution in a wise distribution of greenery, road and grit, which culminate in a reinterpretation of the functions of indoor and outdoor space. The founding idea of the project is to use the whole industrial building as if it was a public road or park, still keeping it as an indoor with some shop or coworking space, so to make it be an entering passage from Red Hook to the waterfront. Vice versa, in the outdoor, different elements of construction are blurred together in the sensible points and used to draw a new pattern of flows, also using trees and car parkings to draw the landscape. The lines drawn by new road and greenery want to mediate the two clashing orthogonal orders present on site, the urban one and the natural on of the shore, so to make the entire site as a good mediator for the opposite parts also in terms of landscaping design.

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With this new landscape conformation, the levels of activity of pedestrians respond in a more appropriate way to the distribution of openings and the balance between architectural volumes and voids. As for Rowe and Koetter’s point of view of the modern city, on the site we see a succession of isolated bodies which, in this case, is not composed by each building individually but by the series of blocks separated by the voids of the roads (4. Rowe and Koetter, 1978). Observing this reality more in detail reveals a plurality of sub-volumes in the block of buildings, a composition which still responds to the sense of a local spatial planning, so not fully influenced by the model of the “modern city” (5. Rem Koolhaas, 1978). This trace of local identity is highlighted and transposed in the façade design of the first floor while the ground one has the role of maintaining the existing pattern, extending it to the inside and finally developing it in a new floor. Each façade tries to mirror the volumes it faces with a crooked surface, so taking advantage from the already rotated asset of the new floor and developing it. In some cases, the façade is continuous but creates the rhythmic succession by alternating its glazed windows with the greenery from the rooftop.

ACTIVE AREA SEMI ACTIVE AREA MOSTLY UNACTIVE AREA PUBLIC BUILDING IN USE PUBLIC BUILDING NOT IN USE PRIVATE BUILDING TRANSPARENT BOUNDARY PROPERTY RHYTHM

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From the analysis, the natural aversion that the different quarters of Red Hook have for viability and any form of transitory interconnection emerges. So the project takes the main architectural body of the site representing this attitude and turn it into solution, the segregated space becomes public, hidden spots become reachable and what was impermeable becomes permeable. The idea leading to the building’s project is to turn the existing impermeable post-industrial block into an urban connector between waterfront and inland, by blurring the outdoor spaces with the indoor one. Using the existing garages as openings, it is possible to open alleys which cross the block from one side to the other. These alleys will be public roads running in between of shops, workshops and cafès, so they will be always open, they will have street lights and public greenery. The architectural nature of the project itself, of course, will create an ambiance which will be calmer and kept apart from the usual noise of the public road, a place to spend time in. The perimeter walls of the existing building have been kept as they bear the original identity of Red Hook as town of piers and warehouses but also, following the streetscape analysis of the roads in the site, they present an interesting pattern of variation in the opening’s number, dimension and, most important, the fact that they are actually in use or not. Previously, the ‘contextual map of pattern’s analysis’(p.73) highlighted how the levels of activity in the roads, registered during the site observations, do not correspond to quantity, quality and function of the openings, both doors, garages and windows. From the analysis, it emerges that the existing façades have potential in terms of site activation, possible communication with the surrounding, architectural local identity, and for the variety, they bring in the pattern of the streetscape. In the project, the alleys crossing the building for urbanistic purposes also want to bring the streetscape of Red Hook inside, the intention is blurring the indoor with the outdoor, so keeping the existing streetscape and bringing it also inside the building confirms itself as one of the main ingredients. The two orthogonal orders present in the area converge in this site, the

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building becomes pin around which the two need to solve their divergences, with a design that solves the evidenced urbanistic problems while having regard for the landscape issues. Thus, a new floor is added to represent, in combination with the first one, the transformation from existing situation to project solution; the crossing of the two is the fulcrus itself on which the two orders meet.

The new floor is then supposed to change the architectural and material language from the existing one and this happens, in a formal way, by reversing the pitched roof into an impluvium that will bring the water to the flowerbeds, in a material way, turning the opaque massivity of bricks into the light transparency of steel and glass, in a structural way, by replacing the concrete columns with IPE profiles.

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Levels of collectivity

The complexive spatial concept for the whole area, building and park together, is the definition of diverses levels of social encounter by the different height of the the ground and the presence of canopies or roofs. This concept is expressed through section and makes a division of the landscape, indoor and outdoor, which changes the theme from ground floor to first floor. If on ground floor the diverse height separates what is “road� from what is work space or more protected relax space, on the first floor the difference is in between what is work space and what is recreational.

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Building design

“We need to become aware of what our cities lack in first place: silent and wide spaces, to ponder, places with long and high galleries to protect from bad weather or the excessive sun, where the noise of charriots and merchants can’t come in and where the finest sense of education would forbid also the priest to pray loud voice: buildings and public gardens that express the sublimity of meditation and keeping alone.”

(6. Friedrich Wilhelm Nietsche, 1882)

The concept of the project investigates not only the pragmatic aspects of the streetscape and urban dynamics, it doesn’t want only to “tell how the site is made but also wants to say how does it work” (7. Bernardo Secchi, 1986). It pays a great attention to what can be called the ‘mood of a place’, the atmosphere or, recalling the ‘contextual map of site analysis’ of page 73, the ‘level of busyness’. The project aims to the delicate job of ruling a place of transition between a busy public road and a quiet park so, with its enclosed alleys and hanging gardens, gradually slows down the life rhythm of the pedestrians entering into a series of protected spaces. Still, the building will be filled with shops and workshops, people working, so the quietness that the project is looking for is not, once again, purely linked to the pragmatism of the structure but must be found into the ‘meaning’ expressed by the entire building’s composition and inner streetscape. The quote from Nietzche also finds a correspondence in how the floor-level, in the different sub-spaces, changes its height in order to define the levels of collectivity. This feature is present both in the building design both in the rest of park, as an element of continuity of the same concept, extended to the two parts of the project which formally exchange their characteristics. This project will deal with the different levels of collectivity o people at different levels of activity, heavily working, studying and recreational.

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Volumetry sketch (2.05) The first model in scale 1:500 aims to define how the design expresses the purposed themes, proportions in the floor-rotation and in cantilevers are overcharged to better highlight the new architectural language. This model also serves to the purpose of masterplanning the distribution of green areas, how many, where and how much wide, also considering that they will require a particular attention in the weight management. This first model is closer to an explicative scheme than a final one and, in fact, it has been made before any technical documentation, with the intention of taking volumetrical and dispositional decisions before drawing the official plan and section.

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First plans (9.05) The difficult aspect of this project is the distribution of the weight due to the rotation in the orthogonal grid from the ground floor to the first floor, from one side, and, from the other, the presence of green segments on only part of the rooftop makes the whole structure inhomogeneous and articulated. As the floor needs to be thicker in correspondence of the flowerbeds, and so needs a specific attention for the weight managing, the system of pillars on the ground floor has been organized by following the first floor direction. As decided the previous week, from the existing building only the perimeter walls of the garages have been kept and the partition of locals has been decided according to the combination of existing walls and new loadbearing system.

The functional layout, as well, follows the existing partitions and the new system of pillars but tries to distribute the chosen functions, shops, cafeteria and workshop spaces, with flexibility among the floors. For instance, the first floor is not going to be kept wide open and only for the cafeteria, functions have to intersecate in a tridimensional way, the same way masses and voids already do in the design concept.

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GF 1:500

1st F 1:500

2nd F 1:500

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Sections (9.05) 14,1

0,6

4,7

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14,1

10,25

10,25

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1

10,25

10,25

6

10,25

10,25

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6

1:200 1:200

3,89

4,4

0,6

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4,4 4,7

3,89

0,6 4,4

4,70,6

3,89

4,4

4,7

14,1

114

9,5

9,5

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0,6

3

4,8 4,9

0,64,8

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9,5

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10,25

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Technical details (9.05)

Aluminium ledge Elastic joint L-profile to hold window frame

Screed 70 mm Insulation 50 mm Polystyrene 100 mm

Reinforced slab 200 mm Vapor barrier PE-foil XPS insulation 160 mm Waterproof vapor - open foil Plaster 10mm

Ventilation duct Ă˜ 102 mm Ventilation grill 220x220mm Plaster false ceiling

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Developing plans (16.05)_EXISTING VS PROJECT 152

60,7

26,3

5,5

67

1:500

118

79,5

Plans have been readapted to solve uncoherences with the fonctional layout, respecting the sun-light-right of every local and firesafety norms.

1:500

119

Developing plans (23.05) 67,5

10,6

26,8

9,4

15

15,45

13,5

23,8

14,6

3,5

7

32,6

17,3

9,6

18

60,8

18,3

5,5

67

1:500

120

49,5

8,8

21,2

6,7

18,1

Added firesafety staircases and toilets, first design of the park.

10,1

8,7

16,5

8,3

28

2,5

9

7,1

15

1:500

121

6,7

18,1

Developing plans (09.06)

10,1

8,7

16,5

8,3

28

2,5

9

7,1

15

49,5

67

1:500

122

67,5

10,6

26,8

9,4

15

15,45

13,5

23,8

14,6

3,5

7

32,6

17,3

9,6

18

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18,3

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67

1:500

123

49,5

8,8

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Descriptive models (12.06)

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Model and visualisations (12.06) The starting idea was creating a series of alleys rich in openings, transparency and covered passages, this concept developed by following the streetscape analysis and culminated in a new design which respects both the starting intentions both the urban pattern of Red Hook.

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Park and surrounding

The entire site shares same kind of activities, related to a predominance of workshops but with also the strong influence of leisure facilities. The design and the distribution of functions draw a new map with several centers of aggregation, which adapts perfectly to the pre-existing context. The squares are evidenced for the different level of the ground and for the presence of gravel, while massive and long elements in concrete and bricks serve as benches, sign the boundary between gravel and grass and recall stylistically the design of the main building, with its brick and concrete walls and its massive structural elements. These seats exist also in a more punctual model and they are used as traffic cones, signing the limit for cars with their massivity and integrated lights.

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The paths in the park are signed by a difference in the ground level and by the sequence of massive concrete and brick elements, always recalling the design feature of the main building. These elements are too low to be used as proper seats and they indicate the path in a discrete way, the path is there and it is not at same time. In order to strengthen the connection between the design of the park and of the building, trees have been disposed in a strategic way to create green canopies and, to reinforce this element, webs have been placed in correspondence of the canopies so to guide the greenery and eventually be also used as support for public lights or for organizing some public exposition by hanging art masterpieces or pictures.

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The presence of the web also ensure that the canopy will still be perceived in autumn when leaves will be absent but tree branches will be growing on the support and suggesting the presence of a subspace, more closed, more protected.

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On the main road and parking, low lights indicate the path to take on the gravel while, from the top, other lights hanging on tree branches and on the web of the canopy highlight the ambiance, the space of air included in the tunnel created by the greenery. The transition from the asphalt to the gravel of the park is made with a layer of cobblestone which lifts up the level of ten centimeters and hold the small rocks. A similar strategy is used in the road and car parking in the proximity of a changing in the street level; in this case, small walls of ten centimeters are placed every seventy centimeters, according to the slope in the ground, to hold the gravel and not letting the rain to wash it away.

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The design of the greenery is extended to the car parking, where trees are employed as a vertical partition between cars, so to sign the space and avoid that some distracted visitor leaves his car taking more space than necessary. In order to design canopies and spatial partitions with greenery, a selection of local trees from the region has been chosen, following criteria of shape and width of the foliage and length and size of the trunk.

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PIN OAK

LONDON PLAN TREE

HONEY LOCUST (yellow leaves)

CALLERY PEAR (white flowers)

NORWAY MAPLE

RED MAPLE (red leaves)

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Pins of viability, linking with Valentino Park The design of the building opens an alley specifically to connect it to Valentino Park, on the waterfront, by making the path pass around the existing warehouse. This side of the building is shaped in a valley filled with greenery, so to stengthen the connection and make the passage gradual from town to park and vice versa.

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Pins of viability, linking with Fairway market All the project area has a strong relationship with the surroundings, both in terms of viability and volumetry, the only linking which remains fragile is the one with the waterfront of the Food market. To compensate the funnel effect of the road in this point, some space is taken from the road, more precisely the amount of space actually used to park cars, and turned into a green buffer to separate it from the walkway; to gain even more space, a wooden passerelle is added in the old dock corner in a strategic way, following the straightest flow of pedestrians from one point to the other.

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8

4

3,7

2,7

8

11

145

4

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(1) La cèntina e l’arco. Pensiero, teoria, progetto in architettura. Carlos Martìs Arìs (2005) p.43 (2) La cèntina e l’arco. Pensiero, teoria, progetto in architettura. Carlos Martìs Arìs (2005) p.44 (3) La cèntina e l’arco. Pensiero, teoria, progetto in architettura. Carlos Martìs Arìs (2005) p.45 (4) Collage City. Rowe and Koetter (1978) (5) Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan. Rem Koolhaas (1978) (6) The Joyful Wisdom, Architecture of men of knowledge. Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzche (1882) paragraph 280 (7) Progetto di suolo. Bernardo Secchi (1986) p.20

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nal grid, in total disagreement with the urban one. At an even lower scale we are presented with the dichotomy volume/void that interests the streetscape and the disposition of its volumes that at times pop up and at others step back. Sometimes we are even faced with the complete absence of any building in between a line of houses, a void that speaks volumes far more than a presence.

At the lowest level of scale, the voids are represented by the openings in the buildings façades, and their quantity, width and disposition draw the cultural background of the people who live there; at this scale, the observation happens at a human level, hence even the smallest variation of size makes a difference in the long and detailed story that the observers can deduce from the buildings.

The design of the entire project, of both the building and park, works on this dichotomy by creating a succession of spaces that look clear and defined even when they are just made up of air. These spaces are not entirely closed, but the presence of certain elements create the illusion of an invisible border, as in the case of the path in the park. The path in fact it is not really there, but it is simply suggested by the disposition of a line of concrete slabs. With its alleys, the building causes people to shift constantly from totally open to partially spaces, then to partially and totally closed ones: this effect is created using the greenery in combination with the structural elements in order to blur the atmosphere of the inside with outdoor one. The theme of ‘blurring the parts’ together is dominant in the design of the project, as it constantly physically brings the park or the public road inside the building while it organizes the outdoor space as if it was indoor. Moreover, from the point of view of the functions, the entire site blurs together work and leisure activities in its buildings: at times the two are homed in the same building, separated only by a wall, while in other cases they are facing each other from two different buildings. The whole coworking activity develops around and through the park and square: the reason beyond this choice is that this way, if workers want to move to another building, they will firstly have to pass through the part designed for the leisure time.

Conclusions The aim of the project is to fill the gap generated by the multiplicity of urban elements in a strategic area of Red Hook, a site in between the waterfront and the main strip, by maximising the result with the minimum effort of only one intervention which can correlate two of its most iconic fields. Moreover, the chosen site presents several interesting aspects of the dynamics between the architectural reality and the use that people make of the space. The project, consisting in the renewal of a building and a park, acts as an ‘urban glue’ between the surrounding areas, it places them into direct communication with a wise study of the flows, it reactivates abandoned areas that still have potential. Finally, it highlights the streetscape of the city, with its structure of openings and architectural volumes: an aspect of the urban pattern of Red Hook that represents its very identity.

The project originates from reflections based on the spatial qualities of the streetscape. Specifically, it focuses on the balance between bodies and voids, on volumes and the space they occupy and the one they leave empty, on the absence of a volume and the consistency of a volume of air.

This reflection touches several scales in the urban scenario: at a big scale it focuses on the variation of the skyline, caused by the highway, that separates Red Hook from the rest of Brooklyn; going down with the scale the rapport touches the city blocks, their disposition and the relationship they build up with the waterfront and the natural orthogo

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Bibliography

Atelier Bow Wow (2010), Behaviorology, Rizzoli Editor, New York Bernard Huet et Christian Devillers (1981), Le Creusot, naissance et dèvelopement d’une ville industrielle 1782-1914, Champ Vallon diff., Bruxelles Bernardo Secchi (1986), Progetto di suolo, Casabella n. 520 Bernardo Secchi (1993), For a town-planning of open spaces, Casabella 597-598, January-February Clemente M., De Rubertis R. (2001), Percezione e comunicazione visiva dell’architettura, Officina edizioni, Roma Colin Rowe and Fried Koetter (1978), Collage city, MIT press, Cambridge Costa M. (2009), Psicologia ambientale e architettonica, come l’ambiente e l’architettura influenzano la mente e il comportamento, Franco Angeli Srl, Milano Cusano G. (1979), La finestra e la comunicazione architettonica, Dedalo libri, Bari D’Alfonso E., Franzini E. (1991) Metafora, mimesi e morfogenesi progetto: un dialogo tra filosofi e architetti, Edizioni Angelo Guerini e associati, Milano Dal Sasso A., Pandakovich D. (2013) Saper Vedere il Paesaggio, Città Studi, Milano Habraken N. John (1987), The control of complexity, Places Journal Habraken N. John (1988), The uses of levels, Keynote Adress Hiller B. (1996), Space is the machine, Cambridge: university press 155

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Hiller B., Hanson J. (1984), The social logic of space, Cambridge: university press Hiller B. (2004), Can streets be made safe?, In urban design intentional 9, 31-45 Italo Calvino (1972), Le città invisibili, Giulio Einaudi, Milano Jan Gehl and Brigitte Svarre (2013), How to study public life, Island press, Washington J. W. von Goethe (1816), Italienische Reise, Penguin Classics Lefebvre H. (1996), The right to the city. In writings on cities, Oxford, Blackwell Lloyd S. (2010), Infrastructure as architecture, Berlin, Jovis Verlag Madanipour A. (2003), Public and private space of the city, London, Routledge Martì Arìs Carlos (2005), La cèntina e l’arco, pensiero, teoria, Chrisian Marinotti edizioni, Milano Nietzche (1882), La gaia scienza, Adelphi, Milano Ray M.A., Sherman R., Zardini M. (1999), Density dilated, Milano, Lotus quaderni Documents Rem Koolhaas (1978), Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan, The monacelli press, Washington

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Scheerlinck K. (2013), Collective spaces streetscape territories notebook, Notebooks 2, Brussels, Ku Leuven Scheerlinck K., Hannes Van Damme (2013), Common streetscapes New York streetscape territories notebook, Brussels, Ku Leuven Scheerlinck K. (2013), Common streetscapes Coney Island streetscape territories notebook, Brussels, Ku Leuven The Botton A. (2006), The Architecture of Happyness, Ugo Guanda Editore, Parma Teerds H., Havik K., Patteeuw V., (2011) Productive Uncertainty, indeterminacy in spatial design, Oase 85, Rotterdam, NAi 010 uitgevers Turri E., (2006) Il Paesaggio Come Teatro, Marsilio Editore Vasilij Vasil’evič Kandinskij (1912), Über das Geistige in der Kunst, insbesondere in der Malerei, SE. Woodcraft, S. Hackett, T. & Caistor-Arendar (2011) Design for social sustainability. A framework for creating thriving new communities, London, Social Life

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Sitography Interview to Renzo Piano about Le Banlieue’s riot http://ricerca.repubblica.it/repubblica/archivio/repubblica/2005/11/22/renzo-piano-la-banlieuesono-ghetti-da.html?refresh_ce Interview to Renzo Piano about the restoration of Harlem https://www.corriere.it/cultura/17_marzo_23/campus-columbia-newyork-renzo-piano-harlem83eba19c-0faf-11e7-94ba-5a39820e37a4.shtml?refresh_ce-cp Article about Renzo Piano’s project in Harlem http://www.artribune.com/tribnews/2016/10/apre-ad-harlem-la-sede-della-columbia-university-disegnata-da-renzo-piano/ https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banlieue https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behaviorism https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Territorio https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/manhattanism http://www.skyscraperdictionary.com/?project=manhattanism History and geography https://redhookfuture.wordpress.com/2013/02/09/109/ History and geography https://landsat.gsfc.nasa.gov/new-york-city-1860/ https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genius_loci 159

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https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citt%C3%A0_ideale#Utopia_urbana_in_Platone https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Repubblica_(dialogo) https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leggi_(dialogo) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congr%C3%A8s_Internationaux_d%27Architecture_Moderne

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Iconography https://redhookfuture.wordpress.com/2013/02/09/109/ https://streetscapeterritories.org/ https://vimeo.com/user8730454 https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Irene%27s_Sediment_in_New_York_Harbor.jpg https://landsat.gsfc.nasa.gov/new-york-city-1860/ https://www.edizionisur.it/sotto-il-vulcano/17-11-2017/ultima-uscita-brooklyn-cinquantanni-doposulle-tracce-hubert-selby-jr-quartiere-ritratto-nel-suo-romanzo/ https://graffica.info/ilustraciones-christoph-niemann/harbours-498x498/

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Credits A special thanks to my teacher, Kris Scheerlinck, for the patience and dedication in following me in each step of this master thesis. I also would like to thank in a special way the classmates who supported me and gave me feedback, and friends from out the class who helped me in a significant way: Nakul Varma for model production and Giulia Calvi, my dear friend from Italy who already helped me previously with the bachelor thesis and now helped me once again.

I thanks also my family for supporting me emotionally and financially, without them, of course, this entire master would never be possible to me. Thanks to my friends living other countries, always supporting me by the distance even if it’s long time we don’t see each other, thanks to KU Leuven for this opportunity and thanks to the Pratt Institute and the Flandres House in New York, for homing me and the classmates and guiding us in the architectural experience of Brooklyn and Manhattan. In the end, thanks to all the teachers of KU Leuven who guided me in these two years of master, far from home.

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Red Hook is a town with a proper identity: it is separated from the rest of Brooklyn by the highway, which acts as an element of separation in the landscape, and it is characterized by an inhomogeneous urban landscape, alternating housing with industrial buildings all around. This discontinuous urban landscape constitutes the very identity of the town itself; however, in most of the cases the transition from an area to the other is not regulated by a proper urban structure. The consequence of this is that the experience of the city becomes arrhythmic, irregular.

The character of Red Hook is not always visible in its streetscape or morphology, most of the times it is hidden in a chaotic amalgam of leftover buildings, a heritage of the industrial development. At the same time, this fragmentary urban structure is due to the original landscape of the wetlands, divided in a series of small islands that every now and then happen to be flooded by the tide of the Hudson river.

The aim of the project is to fill the discontinuity generated by the multiplicity of urban elements in a strategic area of Red Hook, a site in between the waterfront and the main strip, by maximising the result with the minimum effort of only one intervention which can correlate these two iconic fields. Moreover, the chosen site presents several interesting aspects of the dynamics between the architectural reality and the use that people make of the space. The project, consisting in the renewal of a building and a park, acts as an ‘urban glue’ between the surrounding areas, it places them into direct communication with a wise study of the flows, it reactivates abandoned areas that still have potential. Finally, it highlights the streetscape of the city, with its structure of openings and architectural volumes: an aspect of the urban pattern of Red Hook that represents its very identity.

International Master of Architecture - Architecture & Sustainabinity Master Dissertation Studio 2017/18 : Red Hook Prof. dr. Kris Scheerlinck

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