Constellations: Constructing Urban Design Practices

2

Constellations: Constructing Urban Design Practices

foreword

04

Mark Wigley

preface Richard Plunz

the project of urban design & acknowledgements

05 06

Andrea Kahn

1.0 unbound sites edited by Charlie Cannon

the super context for urban design Robert Lane

helping to make the h20 area ‘real’ again Tony Hiss

the problem of seeing the city Charlie Cannon

apparatus v. object Sandro Marpillero

12 22 32 42

2.0 unbound operators interviewer and edited by Phu Duong

city planning and urban design Raymond W. Gastil

nouns and verbs Gregg Pasquarelli

working the urban section Gary Handel

designing process Tim Johnson/ Jim Jonassen/ Jin Ah Park/ Jonathan Ward

54 64 74 84

3

3.0 urban constellations edited by Els Verbakel

the architecture of urban design

96

Els Verbakel

elasticity

104

Tiran Driver / Nicola Gerber

emerging urbanism, the south-asian context Anojie Amerasinghe

the limits of order Urban Think Tank, Alfredo Brillembourg / Hubert Klumpner

variable city relationships, boundaries edges Claudia Herasme / William Kenworthey

analogue thoughts - parallel interfaces Carlo Frugiuele

this site is under construction

120 124 128

Jose Echeverria

lines, points, ďŹ elds

132

Eugenia Vidal

hamar, norway, europan 8

136

Marc Brossa / Julio Salcedo

tail’s end Melissa Dittmer/ Alejandro Guerrero/ Kleber Salas/ Kate Scott/ Elliot Cohen

after words... before worlds

contributors

112 116

Ariel Krasnow

John McMorrough

108

144 146

140

5

Richard Plunz Director, Columbia University Master of Science in Architecture and Urban Design preface

Within architectural discourse in the United States, perhaps the only equivalent period to the present occurred in the 1880’s, when North American and Western European urbanization was reaching its most frenetic pace. Then, as now, there was an era of intense international dialogue that placed a premium on design as a critical tool for reinforcing the growing discourse on urban futures. Back then, as a “developing” city in a “developing” country, New York was the most important laboratory for this process. By the 1920’s, this internationalism was already giving way to codification of the International Style and the globalizing corporate agendas that were to follow. We have now arrived at another critical moment, and New York again finds itself at a crossroads of urban discourse – this time in an expanding global context, and in a “mature” rather than “developing” mode. This city nonetheless remains a laboratory, and the

recent growth of Columbia’s Urban Design Program (in both size and pedagogic sophistication) can be traced to its geographic position within the new global urban constellation. An important anchor for this evolution of the Program has been the first of its three semesters, which has faced the challenge of finding a basis for the new global dialogue within the New York context. The editors of this volume have strived to represent this process in all of its diversity and complexity. This struggle internal to the Urban Design Program’s pedagogic inquiries reflects the evolution of global urban discourse concerning cultures, urbanization, and current ecological realities; in this new era, cities share as much or more than nations.

Within the Program’s first semester, a persistent preoccupation has involved the question of design language and the need to elaborate the traditional realm of “architecture” into the “urban.”

Indeed, one can only design what one can describe, and in this, experimenting with describing New York and its region has proved to be most useful in evolving the linguistic requisites for the Urban Design Program. The elucidation of this challenge comprises a primary contribution of this volume within the new global dialogue on urbanism.

6

Constellations: Constructing Urban Design Practices

Andrea Kahn Coordinator 1st Semester Constellation Studio, MSAUD the project of urban design

Cities today face extraordinary challenges.

Pressures include convergent media, insufficient infrastructure, explosive growth and new settlement patterns.

These exert tremendous stress on what may be recognized, historically, as a defining focus of urban design – the urban public realm. Urban designers working in this context must engage emergent programs, digital technologies and cultural communities that animate a city’s physical fabric in novel and unexpected ways.

At the same time, they must consider how their locally situated endeavors are inescapably linked to urbanization processes worldwide.

practices that can today be included under the rubric of urban design. At the same time, the contributors share an approach to framing urban design problems. They all use innovations in representation to invite constructive conversations across design disciplines, among the many processes implicated in city-making, as well as between theory and practice.

This book’s argument for a globally aware yet locally accountable urban design process is grounded in more than ten years of designbased research on the New York City region produced by students in the first semester, postgraduate Urban Design studio at Constellations: Constellation Studio Design Columbia University Constructing Urban Project, 2004. Mapping of Phases, Design Practices introduces Student Teams, and Study Areas.

(MSAUD). In concepts, tools and any profession, Image from studio website, strategies needed to practice designed by Manolo Ulfer. pedagogy and effectively in this complex practice set up a arena of contemporary urbanism. In an charged and mutually inflecting dynamic. age when thinking about the city is both Education must proffer the knowledge inevitable and necessary, the material and practical tools necessary to admit presented here provides concrete examples its recipients’ entry into their chosen of innovative urban design and research to field. This education also ought to all disciplines concerned with cities. The incite individuals to pursue the kind of volume assembles work deployed at scales questioning that guarantees evolution of a ranging from the local to the transnational, profession beyond its currently imaginable conveying the breadth and variety of bounds. As signaled by its subtitle,

Constructing Urban Design Practices examines the fertile relationship between speculative research pursued in an academic context and the needs of current professional practices confronting urban scale design challenges. This juxtaposition of student and professional work is more than purely instrumental. The conceptual frameworks and representational strategies developed in the academy illustrate and critique the needs of practice, while the demands of practice serve as provocations to reassess techniques and content presumed central in schools. The imperfect mirroring between professional concerns and the mapping of issues in the academy engenders productive tensions necessary to the evolution of urban design as a field. a new conceptual model This book and the studio it originates from aim to contribute to the evolution of urban design practices by enlarging the presumed arena of urban design concerns. Three claims structure this larger project, as well as the choice of content presented here: First, that urban design sites are extensive territories, spatially and temporally. Beyond the narrow area of design action, they also include the larger area of an intervention’s influences and effects. Second, that urban design programs operate as triggers to activate change. No matter their size, projects built in cities do more than house use-program; they provoke urban transformations far-

7

reaching in time and space. Third, that polishing the surface appearance of the city is insufficient. The ideas and projects in Constellations argue that to achieve a substantive effect the urban designer must engage a broad array of physical forms, infrastructural interconnections, development models and social agents.

To lay out rigorous new approaches to urban design that explore, test, and expand these claims this book borrows its organization from the Constellations Studio curriculum that prompted its making. This first-semester MSAUD studio proposes a three-part, sequential process through which to frame, project and test creative design propositions for urban public space. It does so by introducing three urban concepts to design discourse: “unbound sites,” “urban operators,” and “urban constellations”. These terms structure a conceptual model that serves variously as a pedagogical tool, a theoretical framework, and a design methodology. If physical design projects typically begin with a pre-designated “program” (treated impartially as a list of use-functions) and a “site” (viewed as the discrete, bounded place where design actions occur), this model treats the constitution of and subsequent critical engagement with site and program as a principal arena of urban design thinking.

So doing, it offers a basis for constructing urban design practices that can respond to 21st century cities, in their many forms.

The notion of an unbound site prompts designers to consider not simply the territory under their direct control, but the more expansive physical, social and temporal arenas impacted by their actions.

The first section of the book focuses on theoretical issues and actual concerns associated with urban site definition and delineation. It features student diagrams and mappings of the greater New York City region, to illustrate the challenge

of inventing new techniques able to The notion of urban constellation comprehend and describe the role of invokes the ever-shifting collection of largely invisible infrastructures, global physical and non-physical systems that flows, and environmental processes in the interact to configure such operational shaping of local urban strategies. As a design places. The student work activity, constellating stands in dialogue with focuses on assembling four essays that explore the array of physical the contested relationship forms, infrastructural between visualization and interconnections, political action, at scales development models and Probe, Long Island City, 1998. spanning from that of a social agents needed to Phu Duong, Model single building to an entire create new forms of public metropolitan region. space. The book concludes with design work produced by MSAUD alumni – both The notion of urban operator foregrounds as students in the program and now as programmatic agenda over program as use. designers working around the world.

It highlights the agency of urban design Projects included in this catalogue provide projects as instigators of effects as well examples of the limits and potentialities as material supports for everyday use, of assembling and manipulating the reminding the designer that in addition underlying systems - from the formal and to harboring activities, projects perform infrastructural to the spatial and socio– they actively political - that structure operate – in and on urban experience. urban situations.

The second section The conceptual model of the book brings outlined above (and the question of how explored throughout this to actualize urban volume) advocates actively transformations to constructing the basic the fore. Student terms of design operation. proposals for urban The theoretical framework Urban Transformations, Long public spaces it provides construes site, Island City, 1996. Maria Beatriz demonstrate the program and public space Blanco, Collage (process) performative as inherently unstable dimension of urban design. When viewed in constructions that acquire definition conjunction with professional projects, the through the urban design process itself. In student work reveals points of convergence short, it conceives of design as a mode of between methods tested in the studio critical inquiry. and issues facing today’s practitioners, in particular the value of collaborative representation as process design processes; the necessity for DDesign undertaken as critical inquiry effective means of communication; and the begins by questioning the basic terms advantages of capitalizing on migrations and parameters of urban engagement. of knowledge in a globalizing world. The Opening the focus of urban design, in student projects catalyze interviews with particular, to its performative dimensions noted practitioners and city officials, frames that critical process in relation who discuss urban strategies employed in to the dynamic spatial, infrastructural professional practice. and ecological systems that comprise

8

Constellations: Constructing Urban Design Practices

urban conditions. Representation plays a seminal role, serving as a key mode of conceptual operation.

Designers must produce representations to generate the knowledge necessary to construct a given condition as an urban design site. The specific descriptions and analyses that urban designers construct about an extant, external reality do more than simply amass and organize facts, figures and impressions. They establish the terms of design engagement with that reality. The artifacts of the representational process set forth areas of concern, systems in play, forces at work, agencies limiting or inviting action. In making these matters visible, these artifacts also accord them particular value.

structure a single urban location. Advances in digital technologies continue to facilitate drawing together, graphically and methodologically, different kinds of urban patterns, from social geography to natural topography to constructed morphology.

The resulting combinatory mappings prompt designers to ask first, how these patterns interact operationally (do they disturb or support one another?) and in turn, how urban design projects might recalibrate those interactions.

Why map the city as platted settlement pattern onto the city as dynamic ecosystem onto the city as network of socially produced spatial practices? To describe the multiple logics underlying urban complexity yields far more than exciting visual effect. When To legibly portray and clearly representation communicate complex frames existing, urban dynamics takes but often isolated, more than fancy graphics areas of urban or compositional skill. knowledge in novel From the early 1990’s, the and integrated Constellation Studio at ways, it incites Columbia has emphasized fresh thinking the conceptually formative about cities. It also link between representation Pinch Pull Tear, Hunts Point, the invites new alliances Bronx, 2005. Carla Quinones, Stan and urban design. The way to challenge Gray, Matthew Seybert, Site Study urban design ideas take established regimes Model (process) shape will always depend of power that on how designers deploy the tools used to determine the shape of cities. construe and articulate those ideas. For example, hybridizing graphic conventions As many contributors to this volume (sections, plans, schedules, diagrams, etc.) note, representations play a crucial role allows co-present yet distinct urban forms, in setting the stage for dialogue and networks, and programs to be construed debate amongst the many stakeholders relationally. Jumping scales (in a single involved in urban design. Documents of chart or a combinatory mapping) exposes an urban design process bring urban and how differentially extensive forces – local, design issues into public view. Inventive metropolitan, regional, global – interact to representation allows designers to produce

exciting and inventive form, but beyond that, its more profound consequence resides in making clearly legible the transformative capacities of urban design proposals. The selection of student work throughout this book, situated as it is within a broader field of contemporary practices, aims to demonstrate the crucial role of representation in all urban design processes. Innovative diagrams, drawings and models can shift the terms of discussion. They do so not simply by providing stakeholders with something new to look at, but more profoundly, by offering them new ways of seeing –and conceptualizing -- the cities they collectively create.

When the urban design process induces dialogue, it fully takes up the charge to focus on the construction of public space. In eliciting conversations about city life, the work of urban design returns more than successfully designed, physical public places. It brings into being an equally important, non-physical space for politically charged discourse and public debate.

FAR 0, Co-present perspectives on the ground, Greenpoint, Brooklyn, 2003. Flora Chen, Oliver Valle.

Experiential Collage

9

acknowledgements

this book traces the evolution of an approach to urban design teaching and practice, an endeavor that i have been privileged to help shape, as first semester urban design studio coordinator at the columbia graduate school of architecture planning and preservation, since 1992. many people have generously contributed to this project.

The method for critically thinking and engaging cities presented here has been honed by a group of dedicated design studio faculty. Three worked directly with me to realize this book -Charlie Cannon, Phu Duong and Els Verbakel -- and one, Sandro Marpillero, helped lay its intellectual and pedagogical groundwork during eight summers that we taught together.

Others, central to realizing the publication, were only indirectly involved with the studio. Over the years, numerous interlocutors (a host of guest speakers, review critics and symposium participants too extensive to name individually here) have prompted us to continue sharpening our approach. In the summer of 2005, Robert Lane, a frequent visitor, pushed this book into gear with his offhand question, “Does the Studio have an archive?” He, like all the other contributors, graciously donated time and effort to produce this record of the studio’s work. GSAPP Dean Mark Wigley offered critical insights early on that helped refine our thinking, along with crucial financial support throughout. David Hinkle, Associate Dean, invariably smoothed the way on many occasions. Janet Reyes (in the Business Office), Melissa Wolf (in the Alumni Office) and Devon Ercolan Provan (in Development) all offered suggestions and time. MSAUD Program Director Richard Plunz gave the project generous administrative leeway; David Lukmire, Program Assistant, never spurned requests for assistance. Special thanks must go to Jeannie Kim, Director of Publications at GSAAP. Her sharp editorial insights and organizational skill have markedly benefited all aspects of the project. WSDIA, our book designers, creatively and carefully crafted the final book design.

Much needed financial sponsorship was provided by Pelli Clark Pelli Architects, Handel Architects LLP, NBBJ, Cooper Robertson and Partners, and FUSIONarchitects, professional firms committed to quality urban design. Antti Ahlava (through the Helsinki-based DECOMB workshop) kindly underwrote part of the work. The editors deeply appreciate their support. Alumni across the country and around the world supplied original project documentation. Steven Hong and Murad Oomer (MSAUD 2006) volunteered time for image management and Melissa Dittmer (MSAUD 2004) created essential preliminary layouts.

Finally, every summer for fourteen years, a new group of students have tested, challenged and refined the ideas set forth in these pages. In recognition of their hard work and commitment to risk the not-knowing required to expand the field of urban design, and in thanks for all they have taught me over the years, I dedicate this book to all of them. (AK)

10

1.0 Unbound Sites

11

1.0

unbound sites Charlie Cannon, Editor

12

22

32

42

the super context for urban design

helping to make the h20 area ‘real’ again

the problem of seeing the city

apparatus v. object

Charlie Cannon

Sandro Marpillero

Robert Lane

Tony Hiss

1.0 Unbound Sites

12

the super context for urban design robert lane

Emerging Supercities, 2006.

Regional Plan Association. RPA

This essay explores a fundamental conundrum at the intersection of urban design and regional planning. How should urban design practice respond to the new large-scale challenges presented by the mega-region at a time when the scope of most urban design interventions seems confined to the physical scale of infill sites? An expansive re-conception of site and context – one that extends the idea of context to include social, political and environmental aspects of the mega-region, called the “supercontext” by lane, attempts to restore the link between local interventions and regionshaping forces. Urban design representation has an important role to play in describing the nexus between these disparate scales. [EDS] scaling the context: Any individual urban design intervention can be located along a continuum of differently scaled contexts, from the local to the global. The very particular location of a single physical intervention in the built or natural environment lies at one end of the spectrum. At the other end sits the completely unbounded virtual context created by global networks of information and economy.

Between these two poles, resides the “supercontext” – created at the scale of what have come to be called “megalopolitan regions” and “supercities”. Megalopolitan regions, or mega-regions, consist of several integrated metropolitan areas and their hinterlands.

With interconnected economies, markets, transportation systems, and resource support regions, they function as the new unit of planning, infrastructure investment, and global competition. This has created a new dynamic for urban design: vast distances measured in hundreds of miles separate places, and yet physical connections remain meaningful at a scale established by the most efficient distances for high speed rail. Jurisdictional boundaries retain incredible importance, but they are discounted by regional-scale natural systems and mega-regional scale economic and political relationships.

robert lane

13

The purpose behind the idea of “supercontext” is not simply to capture a new geographic scale for thinking about green and grey infrastructure. Supercities and mega-regions are primarily physical constructs, usually described in terms of land area and population. The “supercontext” concept means to extend, out to the physical scale of the mega-region, more expansive and conditional ideas about context and site.

In conventional practice, urban designers use “context” to refer to the physical attributes of the area immediately surrounding their intervention. However, context in a broader sense implicates other considerations, from economics to politics to social structures.

This, in turn, suggests a broader conception of “site” – expanded beyond the boundaries of a particular physical intervention to the scale of the city and even the region (see Site Matters eds. Carol Burns and Andrea Kahn, Routledge, 2005). When this more expansive conception of context extends even farther to encompass the emerging megalopolitan regions, it provides a basis for the idea of a “supercontext” – the bundle of large-scale physical, economic, natural and jurisdictional factors that may in some way influence design interventions even at the scale of a single building or public space.

Promiscuous Zoning Queens New York, 2003 Attiq Ahmed, Vivian Hernandez, Justin Moore, Travis Smith, Van Hsin-Hung Tsao

Just as the idea of context embeds economic, social, political, and environmental considerations, supercontext captures those considerations at a new and much larger geographic scale.

Similarly, if embedded in the idea of “site” are the overlapping boundaries for these same economic, social, political and environmental issues, then supercontext suggests that we will have to find new ways of representing the boundaries between these issues at the scale of the mega-region. For example, an individual urban design intervention may be subject to real estate pressures created by the market dynamics between two cities that at one time were thought of as completely autonomous. The disconnection between the local regulatory framework and the governance protocols beyond the local jurisdictions presents a similar phenomenon associated with the supercontext. incremental urbanism: infill and refill One of the many compelling dynamics activated within the mega-region is the potential synergy between “hot cities” (cities where growth starts to push up against spatial and infrastructure constraints) and “cold cities” (cities that while growing only slowly, have capacity for more expansion). These hot-cold city pairs – New York and Philadelphia, for example, or Boston and New Haven – lie well within range of a true high-speed rail connection. Their dynamic is one whereby the housing and workforce needs of New York and Boston are met by residents of Philadelphia and New Haven, cities with capacity for affordable housing.

hot – cold cities Corporate conglomerates, like Citibank, respond to a similar hot-market cold-market situation when they distribute their operations across the New York metropolitan region to take advantage of easy transport, high-speed communication and distributed labor pools.

14

1.0 Unbound Sites

Most new capacity will be achieved by dispersed infill redevelopment. By some estimates, ten percent of the land within the Northeast mega-region centers lies vacant – some 2000 square miles capable of accommodating (at an average density of six dwelling units per acre) some seven million households, or 77% of the projected population growth to 2050. Perhaps that explains why urban design practice in the Northeast supercontext has produced few district-scale urban design plans: two New York City projects, Battery Park City and Queens West (very much incomplete), and the Big Dig, in Boston, are among the few examples. Rather, almost all of the urban design interventions take the form of infill scale projects: at most, the redevelopment of several blocks in an established street and block fabric, and more often, single sites (albeit, occasionally large ones) for a single multi-use building (housing over office over retail being the standard formula).

This means that a regional-scale problem – the overall desegregation of housing and workplace – will be solved by a multitude of small interventions, each informed not by some new conception of city or urban form, but by very constraining local physical and regulatory contexts.

However, if the ideas of context and site are more broadly conceived – as reaching beyond a purely physical context or the legal boundaries of a specific site – then the architecture at any individual location could presumably impart some larger concept of urban space. The question then stands: how will an individual urban design intervention reflect an idea about site or context that extends not only to the rest of the city, or even the metropolis, but to the geographic scale of the megalopolitan region?

Urbanized Area 2000, 2025 (projected), 2050 (projected), Northeast \mega-region, 2005. RPA

robert lane

Public Archipelago, 2005.

Urban Constellation Diagram Francisco De La Cruz, ChungSheng Liu, Raymond Sih, Pi-Hsuan Sung, Hai Chien Wang, Sang Min You

relational sites In any given location, urban and regional systems interact in many ways – physical and non-physical, immediate and long-term, etc. The Constellation Studio focuses on these dynamic and spatial relations to introduce an operational understanding of urban sites.

Through this bundling method, the Studio offers a third way between incremental urbanism and grand schemes. The “Public

15

Archipelago” project assembles local operations to construct a larger, more extensive urban design proposal. This approach considers the repercussions of local actions across larger fields, forcing the urban designer to conceptualize urban sites as areas of dynamic effect and influence (to “unbound” site) and to consider the unique linkages an urban site has with other locations (to define “sitespecificity” in relational terms).

1.0 Unbound Sites

16

local versus regional tensions: To realize the potential of the northeast megaregion requires region-scale interventions. This includes contiguous greensward initiatives to protect entire natural systems which render jurisdictional boundaries meaningless – resources such as the New Jersey-New York-Connecticut Highlands (see the H2O discussion by Tony Hiss in this volume) or the Long Island Sound – and infrastructure initiatives such as a commitment to a true high-speed rail network.

However, each of these region-shaping initiatives depends on the integration of local land use policies and broader urban design strategies: a commitment, for example, to direct growth from open space resource areas to transit accessible urbanized areas. At one level, urban design continues to be shaped by local land use laws, development practices and market forces. These likely correspond to jurisdictional boundaries. At another level urban design must conform to the larger scale forces at work in the megalopolitan region. The northeast mega-region comprises some fourteen states, 405 counties and several thousand municipalities. Local land use practice rarely supports – and more often undermines – larger objectives. Most local zoning ordinances still depend on Euclidean ideas about the separation of uses, a post-liberal conception of the ideal city rationalized into a set of single-purpose districts described

by Leonardo Benevolo (The Origins of Modern Town Planning, trans. Judith Landry, MIT Press, 1967). This discourages the smaller scale of true infill development in complex urban and suburban environments.

Triborough Bridge Landing, Astoria, Queens, 1999. Collage Perspective. Victoria Ackerman

finding place in the mega-region Urban systems sustain the contemporary city and provide structuring principles for local places. At the same time, these visible and invisible infrastructures tie specific locales to more distant and expansive networks of influence

and effect. For example, an urban location close to public transit shares in a web of possibilities supported by the transit system as a whole. This proposal for the Triborough Bridge Landing explores the potential for new public spaces at the intersection of differently scaled conditions.

The architecture of the actual landing structure, the local consequence of a network of regional transportation infrastructure, delivers specific programming opportunities to the Astoria neighborhood through an identifiable corridor of space available for public re-appropriation.

robert lane

New Jersey, Existing Conditions, 2004. RPA

New Jersey, Projected build-out based on Existing Zoning, 2004. RPA

New Jersey, Alternative build-out, 2004. RPA

Permissive zoning along commercial corridors, for example, assures the spread of auto-dependent strip retail environments which cannibalize, and then leapfrog past, the soon-to-be abandoned malls and shopping centers built during the previous business cycle. Retrofitting and remaking these suburban landscapes has become a minor specialty of urban design. In this setting, urban design hopes, at best, to achieve what Peter Rowe identified as a “middle landscape,” striving for some level of coherence without denying the imperatives of the suburban developer’s “kit of parts.” Just as “infill” has become the principal operation for city centers, “retrofitting” and “refilling” have become the norm of suburban development. In both cases, it seems that urban design for mature regions must focus on accommodation and compromise to develop new concepts of public space rather than relying on large-scale interventions to impose new urban spaces on the built landscape. representing incremental urbanism How should techniques used to represent urban design interventions respond to the conditions of a mature landscape where design work consists, in large measure, of infilling and retrofitting existing environments? First, urban design representation must take on the challenge of showing incremental change over time. This not only mirrors the way urban and suburban environments actually change in a maturing mega-region, but it also acknowledges a political necessity. Residents of the many local jurisdictions, who must become partners in the larger-scale growth management policies of the mega-region, often will not be receptive to, or accepting of, wholesale change. Urban designers can no longer show single static representations of a final “grand vision” regardless of how compelling their imagery. Rather, urban designers must use two strategies: the first, make visible alternative futures; the second, reveal the phased transformation of places (often through photo-real simulations). Designers need to show, as a kind of straw man, the “business as usual” consequences of growth under existing land-use and design practices in order to convincingly present alternative design that attempts to capture a variety of appealing place-making objectives. By acknowledging the inevitability of change, this paradigm better positions local municipalities to make more informed choices about growth. The aim here is to present transformation in digestible and understandable increments, as an alternative to sweeping wholesale change.

17

18

1.0 Unbound Sites

Technology now offers new capabilities, in large measure the result of a convergence of softwares typically employed by architects with the so-called Graphic Information Systems (GIS) used by geographers and landscape architects. The GIS software enables data sets, formerly presented as numerical tables, to acquire graphic life, often in compelling three-dimensional images at once spatially and dimensionally accurate. Land use – formerly a two-dimensional graphic – can now be described in architectural terms, with different uses assigned to accurately scaled buildings in perspective or axonometric views. This enables the intersection of the world of the planner/policy maker with the world of the urban designer.

Certainly it is exciting to bring together urban form and conventional planning information (zoning, land use). Even more exciting is the ability to assemble urban form and new information from other disciplines, information that previously was not assigned physical or spatial attributes. For example, data about socio-economic status, or health, can now be given spatial, urban design representation.

The Index of Diversity (left) Mapped onto 3D Building Blocks in Central London (right), 2003. Michael Batty, University College of London, Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis

robert lane

19

multi-scalar networks This Urban Constellation diagram begins to identify some of the multifaceted relations between settlement patterns, social agents, infrastructure systems and social services at play across the New York region. Each relationship creates particular networks linking some areas and uses but not others. The diagram suggests that the complexity of the supercontext arises not as a function of its extensive physical geography, but from the variety of its multi-scalar network relations.

Layers of Discontinuity, Greenpoint, Brooklyn, 2003. Exploded Axonometric Flora Hsiang Chien, Pei-Lun Lin, Joe Ploue, Time Reed, Gurpreet Shah

20

1.0 Unbound Sites

This has significant implications for the scale relationships between the supercontext of the mega-region and local interventions. The housing-employment synergies between “hot” and “cold” cities can now be depicted in spatial terms. It is even possible to represent changing use patterns for urban spaces, created as a result of cultural pressures from the large new immigrant populations and spatial pressures exacerbated by the ability of labor to travel huge distances between places of work and habitation. Time, one of the strategic new dimensions of urban design representation, is manifest in several ways, including a new interest in representing changes of activity patterns using spatial architectural models. This can be contrasted with a static representation of a space at a single point in time and at a single time of day.

The changes occurring in terms of urban design representation – the apparent political necessity of presenting alternative futures from which the public can choose; the technological capability of depicting data in three-dimensional and architectural terms; the expanded concepts of representation that relate to activities at different times of the day – are all manifestations of a larger reality: the conflation of representation and process.

At base, representation is less about an objective description of a particular physical reality than a subjective interpretation that advances a point of view. This charged relationship between representation and process is at once reciprocal and iterative; drawings and maps change the discussion which, in turn, influences the next round of presentation strategies.

This has several important implications when taking into account the expanded scale and set of concerns associated with the supercontext. With no way to disentangle the relationship between urban design representations and the people who create them, who are the constituents for the maps, drawings and models used to describe, say, the northeast mega-region? The governance issues that have created the need for multi-state, multimunicipal cooperation around land use, environmental, and transportation decisions will be reinscribed in the maps and drawings produced to inform those decisions. This will remain the case until we expand our representations beyond the narrow issue of objective uniform standards for data collection to include the representation of boundaries between different kinds of issues that necessarily overlap. In the most optimistic scenario, the struggle to create a new generation of drawings to represent the supercontext of the megaregion will offer the armature for a new and constructive dialogue about political and economic cooperation.

robert lane

Synergetic Urbanism, 2004.

Intensity Diagram Alejandro Guerrero, Salas Kleber, Uri Mazor, Rene Romero

representing intensity The “Synergetic Urbanism” project sought to identify areas for urban design intervention by creating “intensity diagrams”, a new mode of representation that condensed urban operations (fixed programs, informal practices and the clutter of accidents); scales (metropolitan, regional and global); and timeframes (daily, seasonal,

21

cyclical). While the ultimate outcome of such graphic experiments remains uncertain, they do open up the possibility that urban designers might one day develop an intuitive response to different registers of information, just as repeated use of a scale ruler builds an intuitive understanding on spatial and proportional relations.

22

1.0 Unbound Sites

helping make the h2o area “real” again tony hiss

This essay identifies the difficulty of making large regional concerns vivid or “real.” How can urban design, regional planning or environmental science engage larger public(s) to act in concert? Through his examination of historical maps of New York, Hiss argues that map-making offers a credible tool to render these concerns visible. [EDS]

The New York-New Jersey metropolitan area lies within an enormous, vibrant, natural ecological region of more than 5,350 square miles, even if it doesn’t always appear that way. Development hides its fullness from us in many places, and so does topography: the Hudson River, for instance, is flanked by the Palisades, but the cliffs of the Palisades make it impossible to see the great openness of the Hackensack Meadowlands. And the hills on the far side of the Meadowlands isolate them from the 30-mile-long chain of wild freshwater wetlands that link together to form the looping Passaic River Necklace.

There is so much natural land and water left in the region, of such outstanding quality, that every New Yorker and New Jerseyan can legitimately think of having “two addresses” – a street address and a place in the larger landscape. But when such a powerful reality as this remains hidden from its own inhabitants, what can be done to help people accept its presence into their understanding and their lives? As a first step, colleagues and I have given this astonishing and geologically youthful, water-based, water-sculpted region something it never had before: a name, the Highlands to Oceans (or H2O) Area.

And now it needs an image. A critical issue is how this overarching place can be represented or drawn as a memorable figure that will give it visibility to the people in its midst. This presents a problem shared by environmentalists and urban designers alike.

Regional planning often doesn’t seem “real” to Americans because few regions are as instantly recognizable as, say, the San Francisco Bay Area. To engage the public at large in planning, in caring for, in acting on behalf of the future of the H2O Area, the region, its issues and ideas will need to be made undeniably obvious.

tony hiss

geomorphology & urban form The Constellation Studio views the environment not simply as a geographic point of departure, but as the expression of assorted ecological systems that participate in a multifarious and extensive set of relations.

These ecological systems are understood within the Studio context as one set of urban infrastructures contributing to

Unbound Site, Secaucus, NJ, 2006. Composite Sections Po-Tsung Cheng, Skye Duncan, Christopher Reynolds, Eleni SerafimidouSerafimidou, Kathy Vilnrotter

the form and operation of urban places. While the Studio may not privilege this “second address” it comprehends how underlying geology, hydrology and surficial landforms shape the expression of urban form. Composite sections that reveal how the soft grounds of Secaucus, New Jersey limit opportunities for growth demonstrate this understanding.

23

24

1.0 Unbound Sites

five maps in search of a vision: Maps and mapping provide one excellent source of the images of this place – since they tell us about both the city and ourselves. They register what we’ve noticed, and their omissions tell us a great deal about what we’ve forgotten or haven’t yet seen. Examining historical maps of New York City shows the progress of an almost 400-year effort to find (and to impose) coherence and patterns in (and onto) the island of Manhattan.

Compare two maps of Manhattan – the first from 1782, the second from 1821. The first map, the “British Headquarters Map,” drawn by British soldiers who occupied New York throughout the American Revolution, shows the incredible topographical variation that Dutch and British settlers encountered in Manhattan in the 17th and 18th centuries and that Native Americans had already known intimately for thousands of years.

British Headquarters Map (perhaps 1782) kept at the Public Records Office, London, and first printed in Manhattan in Maps, 1527-1995, Robert T. Augustyn and Paul E. Cohen (Rizzoli, New York 1997)

tony hiss

For the military garrison headquartered in the small town of New York, way down in the flats at the southern tip of the island (shown in pink), this map provided information vital to the defense of the city – and gave the soldiers something to do during the long years when New York had become a largely uncontested backwater in the war for American independence. The British took the map with them after their surrender – a great loss, since it was no longer available to New Yorkers, as Augustyn and Cohen point out in their work Manhattan in Maps (1997), to guide the city’s explosive post-Revolutionary growth.

Final Commissioners’ Plan of 1821.

John Randel, Jr. Based on the first “Commissioners’ Plan” from 1811 now in the Library of Congress, and reprinted in “Manhattan in Maps”

The second map, the “Final Commissioners’ Plan of 1821,” by John Randel, Jr., was the officially local adopted plan for growth and shows no topography whatsoever: no hills, no valleys, no streams, no valleys, and only miniscule parks. In large part it represents the unbounded urbanizing aspirations of the New York developers of the period, men who “put the hills in the kills (the old Dutch word for streams) to make fill” – and thereby literally created a level playing field for construction.

25

1.0 Unbound Sites

26

Two recent maps continue the work of helping New Yorkers and New Jerseyans, who now live in the most densely settled corner of the North American continent, to remember that they are still surrounded by vast tracts of green land and blue water as well as by the more obvious grays and browns of thousands of streets, roads, and buildings. In 1995, the non-profit Regional Plan Association, identifying a renewed need for a comprehensive vision for the tri-state area, released “Region at Risk: The Third Regional Plan for the New York-New Jersey-Connecticut Metropolitan Area” (1996). RPA’s first two regional plans, in 1929 and 1968, had laid the groundwork for many of the New York area’s great modern public works projects, including a post-war network of superhighways and a million acres of parks.

“Region at Risk” included the “Regional Greensward Summary Map,” an arresting image that highlighted the need to celebrate and protect the enormous and still virtually intact ecosystems that enfold the area, including the Highlands, the region’s tri-state slice of the Appalachian Mountains – several million acres, all nearby, of rugged peaks, deep forests, bears and bobcats, and drinking water supplies for more five million people.

Inspired by the Plan and the “Greensward Map” that accompanied it, New Jersey in 2004 set up a regional planning process for 800,000 Highlands acres, half of which have been designated a strictly protected “Preservation Area.”

Penn Yards, Manhattan, 1999.

Probe Model, Magu Bueno

In this project, a post-Viele attitude is taken to green space in Manhattan, here weaving a

“green roof” over the Penn Yards infrastructure to create a new public terrain.

tony hiss

a stereo view of urban infrastructure The shift by the Constellation Studio from a concern with urban form to urban operations achieves two ends: It revalues the ecological role that public

Public Hazards/Public Spaces, NYC Region, 2005. Urban Constellation, Chart of Operations, Water Collection Section Francisco De La Cruz, Chung-Sheng Liu, Raymond Sih, Pi-Hsuan Sung, Hai Chien Wang, Sang Min You

and habitat spaces play in the city. And, it facilitates thinking about the potential palliative ecological functions that technical systems in the city might serve. In this Chart of Operations and section, the

27

“Public Hazards/Public Spaces� project explains how water and planting could perform as public space makers, filtering technologies and natural amenities.

28

1.0 Unbound Sites

Viele’s Water Map, 1865.

Egbert Ludovicus Viele Library of Congress, and printed in “Manhattan in Maps”

But on closer inspection, the Randel map also reveals an outward-looking concern for a larger context, or “sphere of influence,” if you will. The document portrays the distances between Manhattan and its surrounding islands with a high degree of accuracy; it provides an abbreviated street plan of Philadelphia (New York’s main rival at the time); and it anchors New York within a regional map of New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut that reaches out as far north as Cape Cod, Massachusetts. Randel cared about transportation, about the relations between competing markets, and about New York’s ability to find its place in the world.

Looking next at “Viele’s Water Map” from 1865, we see a map that reconciles the first two maps. The “Viele Map” shows how much of the city’s original topography had already disappeared, thanks to the rapid northward march of development (Central Park has also put in a first appearance, if you look carefully). The overt intention of the map, to this day still prized by New York officials, builders, and landlords, is to chart hidden pitfalls. It supplies critical pieces of what had already become hidden or subterranean information at the time of its making: the underlying geology and water courses of the city, including each kill and spring, which, even when covered, might flood new excavations if you didn’t know where you were digging.

But the “Viele Map” is also revered by H2O Regionalists because its “stereo” or “binocular” or “3D” approach to New York makes clear the city’s twin strengths – its astonishing natural abundance and its amazing record of human endeavor. As such the “Viele Map” serves as a founding document for a 21st century effort to reconcile these realms by safeguarding both of the “two addresses” that mark the joint legacy of everyone in the region.

tony hiss

29

The Wetlands: An Ecology Suppressed, Secaucus, 2005. Excerpt, Urban Constellation Powerpoint. Mark Delgado, Murad Oomar, Tse-Hui Teh, Dimitrios Vlachopoulos

mapping system relations Identifying structuring relationships between built and natural systems – as shown in this analysis of the Meadowlands – has been made easier by Geographical Information Systems. Rendering such information visible becomes vital if urban designers are to play a productive role in public conversations about large-scale problems.

30

1.0 Unbound Sites

If the bold graphics of the “Greensward Map” had any omission, it was that almost all the land south of the Highlands was colored a uniform light gray and identified only as “Developed or Developing Lands.” This color scheme inadvertently reinforced the longstanding, highly inaccurate, post-Viele myth that green and blue forces – birds, wildlife and wilderness, long views, solitude, ecological processes, and nature itself – had either abandoned or had been “cleansed” from the core of the region.

To remedy this oversight, RPA, working with the H2O Fund, the Highlands Coalition, the GreenInfo Network in San Francisco, and later the great New York graphic designer Milton Glaser, produced the “H2O Highlands to Ocean Regional Map” [fig 15]. The “H2O Regional Map” shows urban fabric and highways only in a small inset map. The only sign of human inventiveness and intervention in the main map is the New York/New Jersey state line, retained to help people orient themselves.

Regional Greensward Map, 1996. Robert Yaro & Tony Hiss, Region at Risk, Robert D. Yaro and Tony Hiss (Island Press, Washington, D.C., 1996)

Otherwise the “H2O Map” presents only topography and hydrology: 400 years of accumulated human presence have been deliberately stripped away. The great surviving natural features of the region – the Highlands, the Passaic River Necklace, the Meadowlands, the Palisades, the Hudson River – are all, for once, inescapable. The “H2O Map,” intentionally a bit of a puzzle, requires people to find their street address within the context and coordinates of their less familiar “second address”: “I guess I live sort of here – no, wait a minute, I live here!” More than a plan, the “H2O Map” strives to become an emblem and icon – producing an image the mind can retain as a next step in securing a permanent, treasured, and shared natural identity for the entire H2O region.

tony hiss

H2O Highlands to Oceans Map, 2004.

Milton Glaser. Printed in H2O Highlands to Ocean: A First Close Look at the Outstanding Landscapes and Waterscapes of the New York/ New Jersey Metropolitan Region, Tony Hiss and Christopher Meier (Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation, Morristown, New Jersey, 2004), www.regionbuilder.org

31