TRANSACTION Hanxiao Yang GSAPP Spring 2013 Instructor: Kazys Varnelis, Ph.D. Associate: Leigha Dennis
TRANSACTION Transaction is an exchange of ideas, goods, people, etc. It concentrates in cities where most of the actions take place, thanks to the density and complexity of urban resources and populations. In the city, people and objects are always in movement, for different
intentions, to various destinations, with distinctive speeds and costs. Along with the physical transactions of people and goods, there are always transactions of ideas and money.
In the early 20th century, technological development, especially those in transportation systems, helped the urbanization of cities with increasing transactional capacity. By 1960s, cities have gradually established a network that serves different kinds of transactions.
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1827 Omnibus Omnibuses were oversized stagecoaches that ran along a fixed route. They were the first mass transportation vehicle and were meant to seat 15 passengers.
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1860 Horse Car Horse cars rode along embedded iron or steel tracks. They were designed to carry more people and offer a smoother ride than omnibuses. Horse-drawn vehicles jammed city streets because their numbers weren’t regulated. They carried around 50,000,000 passengers.
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1883 - 1909 Cable Cars New York City’s first cable car line opened in 1883 on the new Brooklyn Bridge. Cable Cars were moved by steam-driven machinery in a powerhouse, which continuously drew a loop of wire cables through a slot beneath the street.
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1890 - 1950s Trolley Cars Trolleys operated by electrical power delivered through wires running overhead or in underground conduits. They were faster and cleaner than horsecars and cheaper to build and operate than cable cars. The trolley足cars (and a few surviving horse-cars) transported about 500,000,000 passengers, at a speed of 6 miles per hour.
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1896 Taxi The first taxicab company began running 12 electric hansom cabs in July 1897. It ran up to 1,000 cabs by the early 1900s. The New York Taxicab Company imported 65 gasoline-powered cars from France in 1907, cabs were repainted them all yellow to be visible from a distance. By 1908 the company was running 700 taxicabs. The fare was 50 cents a mile, a rate only affordable to the relatively wealthy. 6
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1905 Motor Buses New York was the first American city to use motor buses for public transit. In 1905 the Fifth Avenue Coach Company introduced gasoline-powered double-decker buses that operated on crosstown and uptown lines. Within two years, it had replaced all of its horse-drawn vehicles with motor buses.
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1920 - 30s Motor Buses Motor bus service expanded greatly in the 1920s and 30s. Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia ordered that motor buses replace all electric-traction vehicles, including trolleys. More than 700 buses were purchased for the Manhattan conversion in 1935-36 that established the standard in bus design.
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1868 Elevated Train New York City’s earliest form of rapid transit was the elevated railway, or el. Designed to run on tracks nearly three stories above city avenues, at a speed of 12 miles per hour, the elevated trains drastically changed the ways New Yorkers viewed their city and lived their lives. By 1880 most Manhattan residents were within a ten-minute walk from an el. 10
The els ushered in aspects of urban life that we now take for granted – from being able to live, work, and shop in different parts of the city, to constantly interacting with people from different neighborhoods and backgrounds. Although the els were dirty and noisy and blocked sunlight from the streets below, they allowed people to travel quickly and cheaply throughout the city for nearly a hundred years.
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1902 Subway Construction: City Hall
1900 - present Subway The IRT (Interborough Rapid Transit Company) began construction on the first subway line in 1900. City authorities determined to build the subway to quickly and efficiently move people about in and out of crowded Manhattan to ease New York City’s demand for rapid transit. Most of the subway system we know today was built swiftly during a great burst of 12
construction from 1913 to 1931. Passengers appreciated features of the system, including choices between local and express service, fewer weather-related delays than street transportation. The served nearly 5,000,000 passengers every day with 26 train lines operating on over 800 miles of track, at a speed of 40 miles per hour, running 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
1903 Subway Construction: Times Square
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1905 The Speedway Harlem River
Not only within cities, many bridges and highways were being constructed to relieve the population density in the early 20th century. People commuted from outside by private cars and trains. More transactions took place in between cities and suburbs/ other cities.
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1910 Brooklyn Bridge
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1911 Rush Hour on Queensboro Bridge
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1946 Weary Commuters by Stanley Kubrick
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Baltimore C-44 Bus
1960s When it comes to 1960s, most cities have obtained complex network systems to carry everyday transactions: subways, elevated trains, buses, ferries as public transits, as well as tunnels, bridges and expressways that are more for private car owners.
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Boston
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1956 - 1962 TWA Flight Center Eero Saarinen This is a project celebrating the increasing transactional capacity. When Saarinen was commissioned in 1956, the client wanted this building to capture the “spirit of flight,� and as visitors rush to make it to their flight there is no choice but to admire the swooping concrete curves that embraced flyers into the jet age. 20
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The structure consists of a shell of reinforced concrete with four segments that extend outward from a central point. The concrete “wings” then unfold on either side of the exterior, preparing for flight. ‘... a place of movement and transition... The shapes were deliberately chosen in order to emphasize an upward-soaring quality of line. We wanted an uplift.’ -- Eero Saarinen 22
Following TWA's continued financial deterioration during the 1990s and eventual purchase by American Airlines, the terminal ended operations in October 2001.
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Transactions burst opportunities and interests, intensifies social interaction which livelihoods and welfare depend. Along with the physical transactions of people and goods, there are always transactions of ideas and money.
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1960 Bus carrying advertisements
Economical Interests Businessmen seek interests either by carrying advertisements around on transits, or displaying it at places where there are more transactions.
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1960 Advertisements along roads
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1958–63 Pan Am Building Emery Roth & Sons, Pietro Belluschi and Walter Gropius
Next to Grand Central Terminal, Pan Am Building (as it was known at the time) was the largest commercial office space in the world when it opened on March 7, 1963. It was Pan Am’s headquarter until 1991, it moved its headquarters to Miami.
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1968 Grand Central Tower Marcel Breuer In 1968, Marcel Breuer propsed a 55-storey skyscraper to be built over Grand Central, even bigger than the Pan Am Building. However, the plans drew huge opposition. The building didn’t get built as the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission designated Grand Central a “landmark.”
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1963 - 1968 Penn Station (Madison Square Garden) Robert E. McKee, Charles Luckman By 1963, changing economic conditions and the evolving nature of passenger transportation prompted the Pennsylvania Railroad to announce plans to sell development rights on the Penn Station site. The station would be demolished and replaced with a new Madison Square Garden complex; the railroad would create a new underground “Penn Station� beneath the Garden. 32
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The replacement of Penn Station by Madison Square Garden was an ideal business solution. It significantly cut its overhead, the railroad would make it possible for more people to attend Garden events, and, likewise, the presence of the Garden would induce more Manhattan-bound travelers to ride the railroad.
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During the 1980s and 1990s, passenger traffic at Penn Station increased so dramatically that the station’s future was very much in doubt. The Farley expansion project was called, and finally got constructed by 1999. Now, The new Penn Station is arranged into “Amtrak”, “NJ Transit” and “LIRR” concourses, carrying 600,000 commuters every day. It is not just a railroad station, but a public place, a civic center.
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1959 Donald Byrd on the A Train
Intellectual Values Places that carry more transactions also became platforms for people to share their talents and interests.
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1980 New York Subway Graffiti
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Morris Katz Art Studio Gallery
1958 - 2007 Morris Katz Known as the “King of Toilet Paper Art”, Morris Katz holds two Guinness World Records as the world’s fastest painter and the world’s most prolific artist. His motto is to “paint it fast, paint it fast and sell it cheap.” And his gallery was situated at the corner of Jefferson Market Garden, crossroad of 6th Ave and Greenwich Ave..
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The Factory
1968 - 1973 Andy Warhol Andy Warhol used silkscreens so that he could mass-produce images the way capitalist corporations mass produce consumer goods. The Factory located at the north corner of Union Square, where he assembled a menagerie of adult film performers, drag queens, socialites, drug addicts, musicians, and free-thinkers to help him create his paintings, starred in his films. 39
1960s Window Shoppers
Sidewalk Sidewalk, which seemingly has less capacity than rapid transits and cars to transact people and objects in distance, also, if not less, transacts massive information. It is a place of movement and change, but in a pace that allows more interactions. The intricacy of sidewalk use guarantees its irreplaceable role in cities.
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1960s Street Artists
“There is a quality even meaner than outright ugliness or disorder, and this meaner quality is the dishonest mask of pretended order, achieved by ignoring or suppressing the real order that is struggling to exist and to be served.”
“...frequent streets and short blocks are valuable because of the fabric of intricate cross-use that they permit among the users of a city neighbouhood.”
-- Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities 41
1969 - 1975 Roosevelt Island Philip Johnson and Johnson Burgee A project rivitalized its isolated condition by increasing its transactional capacity.
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Welfare Island Roosevelt Island - known as Welfare Island between 1921 and 1973 - was remained unknown to the majority of New York with no direct access from outside, no attractions except for decrepit hospitals and a fire department school.
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The original masterplan in 1969 by Philip Johnson and Johnson Burgee, which was partially executed in 1975 by UDC, opened the island towards the rest of city through bridge, subway and tram, turning the island a residential town of different incomes housing.
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Pedestrians were prioritized in the plan; automobiles would be relegated to the “Motorgate� parking garage, connected directly to Queens via bridge. The center of activity would be the subway station, from which individuals living on the island would commute to jobs in Manhattan.
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Open access brings more transactions to the island. Commuters are consisted of residents and island employees that commute between the island and outside mainly through subways and trams. The community, designed as a multi-mixed walkable town, facilitated quotidian interaction, provided with various programs that also allow the economical and social transaction.
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1969 Proposed G Street Pedestrian Concourse for Washington, D.C. WMRT A project integrated the transaction of people with commercial transitions. In this proposal, architects WMRT designed the existing street above the subway roofed with a simple structure. Below street level, a new shopping concourse is connected to the rapid transit level below.
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1976 Street Prostitute from Taxi Driver
Negative Transactions Some transactions can be negative to the society. They take advantage of the economical values mass transactions bring.
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1960s Beggars
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1946 New York Buses
Cities process a wide range of transactions. They take place at the same time. However, overloaded transactions in cities make people more blase to others and reserved to themselves.
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1969 New York Subway
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1964 Baltimore Inner Harbor Wallace and McHarg A project transforming a transportational harbor into a civic center that carries social and commericial transactions. In the 1950s, economic shifts ended both the freight and passenger use of the Inner Harbor. In 1964 plans for the Inner Harbor, the highways going by (I-83 and I-95), make the harbor more of a lagoon. 54
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However, the construction of the expressway didn’t get approved. In the 1970s, The waterfront was gradually transformed with award-winning parks and plazas surrounded by office buildings, hotels and leisure attractions, which reversed the city’s decline and became a model for urban renaissance in cities around the world.
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Hanxiao Yang GSAPP Spring 2013 Instructor: Kazys Varnelis, Ph.D. Associate: Leigha Dennis
Yang, Hanxiao. TRANSACTION