The Domestic Collective

The Domestic Collective A New Ground for Shared Life Jack H. Foisey Wentworth Institute of Technology Masters of Architecture 2021

Jack H. Foisey Wentworth Institute of Technology Masters of Architecture 2021

The Domestic Collective A New Ground for Shared Life

Abstract Architecture today has struggled to clearly represent the strong bond between our collective values, existing built fabric, and spatial aspirations.

Ownership has largely become unrealistic and if attained, unsustainable. Late Capitalism, and the sharing economy, has deeply spatialized economic pressures in the ways in which we collectively live.

This thesis, The Domestic Collective, proposes a shared model of ownership, a critically repositioned model of domesticity spatialized by an architecture that facilitates exchange and flux.

This specifically engages Seward Park Housing Cooperative, the site for the thesis. The proposed program, computation center and exchange space, builds on the Cooperatives history of Settlement Houses attempting to reconcile a fractured set of urban intensities created by Title I of the 1949 Housing act that wrongfully displaced thousands of people. The proposed ownership model, program, and architecture reconcile the palimpsest ground with the individual and collective.

Keywords Collectives, Ownership, Digital information, Computation, Interaction, Social Realms Definitions Domestic Collective (de-’me-stik ke-’lek-tiv) Noun 1. A large number of people living in an area definied by a legal and non-physical entity.

2. A product of the information age and the tower in the park typology.

3. A communal ideal focused on the domesticity of the body and space.

Acknowledgments This thesis exploration, writing, and book would not have been possible without many of my peers, professors, and family.

I’d like to specifically thank Robert Trumbour, Chala Hadimi, Robert Cowherd, Mark Klopfer, and Antonio Furguiele for guiding me through this thesis. I’d also like to thank John Ellis to whom I am in debt to his generosity and guidance ever since I began seriously studying architecture as a freshman at WIT. John, Nahdaan Munkkiniemessa. I’d also like to thank Carol Burns for her encouragement and profound advice. Lastly, I’d like to thank Steven Lotter, Samantha Riback, Matthew Messere, Jenna Acord, Jackson Nissen, Emily Chowdhury, and Katherine Small for helping articulate and clarify the thesis.

Contents Abstract Dedication Acknowledgment Page Introduction Chapter 01 001-007 Statement Context Framing the Narrative Audience Structure Conclusion Literature Review Chapter 02 008-017 Introduction What is data and how does it duplicate the human?

Thomas Jefferson Yeoman Attempts at Control of Space and the Human Doubling Space Design as Research 01 Chapter 03 018-049 Introduction Precedents Information and Architecture Design as Research 02 Chapter 04 050-083 Manhattan Seward Park Cooperative Attenuation Strategies (Infill, Wrap, Density, Ground) The Domestic Collective Representation Outcomes Chapter 05 084-107 Final Presentation A Few Notes Critical Reflection Chapter 06 108-111 Bibliography and Figures 112-117

2.5 Quintillion bytes

of information created everyday.*

4.66 Billion

internet users whose individual information is stored across 40-200 different data centers.

2, 508 housing cooperatives in Manhattan, New York alone. this does not account for the number of buildings or number of residents.

$1,640

the estimated value of Seward park housing collectives information with no incentive. once introduced to todays late capitalist sharing economy market the true value is exponentially higher.

individual = 40 cents

x > 2,000 consumer focused subscription based businesses

Figure 01: Seemingly Random Statistics. Image accessed April, 21, 2022

CHAPTER 01

Introduction

Statement Shifting models of living, values, and digital information in recent years have created space for new ownership possibilities in domestic collectives.

Through the development of a model of shared infrastructure, this thesis explores collective living with digital information. The project expands a definition of consolidation and distribution by critically repositioning existing modernist models of domesticity in favor of shared ownership between the ground, individual, and built environment.

Context 2.5 Quintillion bytes of information are created every day. There are 4.66 billion internet users whose individual information is stored across numerous data centers. There are 2,506 housing cooperatives in Manhattan New York, which does not account for the number of buildings or number of residents. $1,640 is the estimated value of Seward Park Cooperatives collective information with no incentive. With incentive that number is infinitely higher. These statistics seemingly random characterize an age, place, and value which together construct a context and an architecture. This context and architecture are as undefined as possible where each take on new sites to intervene. The over arching theme of these statistics and our context is media and information and how they exchange with and change the ways in which we live and the built environment. New models of living are no stranger to architecture. Namely the modernists and post WWII economics developers and city officials. Modern values clashed with capitalist pressures to consume,

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abstract, and demolish. The tower in the park typology, also known as the cooperative, became a new unit of urban fabric even in the rigid grid of Manhattan. These cooperatives reorganized not only built fabric but communal resources, amenities funding, and outlook. This optimistic reorganization, however, became the demolition and displacement of communities. Specifically, in the Lower East Side of Manhattan, a number of cooperatives were constructed, therefore a number of communities demolished, and an even larger number of people displaced. This is an agenda of modernism and capitalism, consumption and reorganization atop a rich ground. Which brings us to the question: how can we engage these cooperatives today? While most perspectives on the products of modernism and capitalism are negative it did construct a catalyst for information and the possibility of shared resources and space facilitated by architecture. Today we see late capitalism1 and the sharing economy engaging these collectives on new grounds. One collective in particular is Seward Park Cooperative, the site for this thesis which proposes burying a computation center underneath Seward Park, three structures to facilitate exchange, and an ownership model for the residents.

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Preceding this history is the journey of how the ground was interrogated and represented.

This journey includes the interrogation and representation of the body in relation to a collective. Dating back to Thomas Jefferson, the Yeoman and the division of land became a sociopolitical geographic ideal in relation to urban planning and lifestyle. This ideal, while it didn’t catch on, embedded itself in economic practices of land division, acquisition, and selling. It became an ownership model and was folded into forms of capitalism to come.2 Today, we see the lasting effects of these practices not only in tools such as ArcGIS but in our lifestyles, ownership models, and domestic spaces. Standing tall through the large architectural shifts of the mid to late 20th century are the tower’s in the park specifically the tower’s in the park of the Lower East Side of Manhattan.

The tower’s in the park of the Lower East Side stand on a the Settlement House’s ground breaking effect. Settlement house’s were typical homes that ran off of communal support and voluenteering. In 1893, Lilian Wald a teacher and nurse, moved with Mary Brewster into a Lower East Side Home on Henry Street.3 The home became a space where

Figure 02 (Top Right): Black Causus Dance. by Co-op City, 1970. Image accessed April 17th, 2022.

Figure 03 (Direct Right): Array of surfaces from Manhattan, New York.

Accessed April 9th, 2022.

(CCBY Jack H. Foisey)

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anyone could receive medical attention or other community resources. The Settlement House was inspried by British University students who created Toynbee Hall in London’s East End.4 “... Settlements did not see themselves only as service providers; they also intended to become centers for neighborhood reform.” 4 Framing the Narrative Three interests inspired this exploration: a general interest in our current global context, an interest in new types of program associated with public/landscape, and a specific interest in new collective living models. The first interest has been a constant beginning before I began seriously studying architecture. This lead me down many paths such as researching and exhibiting work on Architecture that engages the digital world, multifamily housing projects through CD’s, dissecting adaptive systems, and the effects of architecture in global cities on the rest of the world. The second interest comes from a semester of landscape architecture that allowed me to explore a short history of landscape architecture culminating in a studio project that ran parallel to this thesis. The third, comes from a curiosity in how people live, from daily life to exceptional situations. Together these interests provided motivation and direction for the thesis.

Audience This thesis exploration is directed towards the general public or more specifically anyone who is interested in architecture and how we collectively live today. The Domestic Collective is intended to start a conversation that goes further than discussion but prompts possible answers to collective problems that we all face today. Questions like: how can we own differently? what can the ownership of our digital information provide the general public? what does a space that facilitates the exchange between collectives and individuals look like? what does a space that supports a connection between us and

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our information look like?

Structure Literature Review (Chapter 02): This chapter examines the history of alternative representations of the human while establishing the need to take control of our excess data through architecture.

Design as Research 01 (Chapter 03): This chapter is explores a synthesis of the previous Design as Research, chapter 03, exploring an age, place, and value.

Design as Research 02 (Chapter 04): This chapter evidences site selection, analysis, and design tests in relation to Chapter 02 and Chapter 03.

Outcomes (Chapter 05): This chapter displays the final thesis presentation and details the final thesis proposal.

Critical Reflection (Chapter 06): This chapter is a thesis program retrospective, a critical look back at the thesis exploration from first explorations to final presentation.

Conclusion This thesis exploration materializes possible architectural solutions by recognizing the spatial effects of the issues plaguing collective living. By doing this we can reposition nonarchitectural models to enact an architectural change generating solutions for contemporary domesticity. All of this, of course, being motivated by a larger interest and energy towards architecture, it’s history, and how can live differently.

Figure 04 (Top Right): Coop Peace Committee. by Co-op City, 1970. Image accessed April 17th, 2022.

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End Notes 1

Late Capitalism can be described as the end of capitalism

sparked by industry and solidified by the information age. It can also be characterized by the sharing economy where value and competition are exhausted to the point of failure creating space for a new model. The term was first used by the economist Werner Sombart in Der Moderne Kapitalismus published between 1902 - 1927 to describe a stage of capitalism.

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Le Corbusier and the Architectural Promenade, by Flora

Samuel published in 2010, describes the idea that Le Corbusier (a symbol of modernism) designed with the idea that the body should move through a building in a specific sequence. The architectural promenade became something much larger.

The promenade, during the rise of modernism, became a solidified form of urban planning, architecture, and capitalism.

The movement of goods and people between the city and hinterlands created systems of exchange and boundaries of definition ossifing the metropolis and the hinterland. Resources became the currency of exhcange such as: peoples time and labor, physical material, gas, water, and fuel. The promenade played a large role in the development of capitalism reaffirming industrial scale production and the automobile.

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Lilian Wald our history. (https://www.henrystreet.org/about/

our-history/lillian-wald/#:~:text=Born%20into%20a%20life%20 of,she%20founded%20Henry%20Street%20Settlement). Lilian Wald played a large role in the development of Settlement Houses in Manhattan along with the NAACP, United States Children’s Bureau, the National Child Labor Committee, and the National Women’s Trade Union League.

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Jeffrey Scheuer, University Settlement of New York City.

https://socialwelfare.library.vcu.edu/settlement-houses/ university-settlement-of-new-york-city/). (directly from text) “NOTE: This history of University Settlement is taken from ‘Legacy of Light: University Settlement’s First Hundred Years,” a 32-page pamphlet written by Jeffrey Scheuer, 1985. The photographs and news clips were provided by Amanda Peck, Assistant Director for External Affairs and Donor Relations for University Settlement and its subsidiary organization: The Door.”

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Figure 05: Ohio, Indiana, Michigan lines. by William Edwards Peters, 1918. Image accessed November 05th 2021 via Ohio Lands and Their Subdivision by William Edwards Peters, Harvard University pp.169.

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CHAPTER 02

Literature Review

This chapter examines the history of alternative representations of the human while establishing the need to take control of our excess data through architecture in an age where data has motivated the de-privatization of domestic spaces.

Introduction In order to understand how architecture can use data to reprogram space and allow us to take control of the data we create; we need to examine the history of alternative representations of the human. Today, as analyzed in the following review, data is seen as a medium of alternative representations inheriting structures of control from the Yeoman and the Gilbreths. Examining history helps one understand our current situation, which is a decrease of available private domestic space due to the saturation of technology in the home. These representations have been used by private corporations and governments to control space and people. This transforms what it means to be at home. Reviewing land surveyor William E. Peter’s Land Division maps, architectural historian Siegfried Gideon, anthropologist Arjun Appadurai, and political scientist and anthropologist James C. Scott juxtaposed to Mark Jarzombek, Max Kuo, and Tatiana Knoroz allows us to conceive of a way to use architecture to reprogram space. The review of these authors and precedents establishes a need to take control of our data and reframe what it means to be at home.

What is data?

At the heart of architectural historian

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Mark Jarzombek’s 2014 book Digital Stockholm Syndrome in the Post Ontological Age is that the world would malfunction without data.1 The data Jarzombek is referring to is the information we create when we use the internet, our phones, GPS, or any object that produces it.2 Jarzombek evidences the large-scale production of data through a timeline. The timeline records the chronological proximity of social media platforms with the passing of legislation concerned with smart technologies.

The use of digital things, and the creation of data tied to humans is considered digital exhaust, or rather, ontic exhaust.3 Exhaust classifies the data as a byproduct or surplus of a practice or system.

Jarzombek takes this a step further to say that it’s not only digital but ontological in that it recreates humans and objects. How this works is the high resolution and large amount of data created and collected is, according to Jarzombek, enough to stand in for a human’s existence.

Jarzombek’s discussion of data and humans suggests two entities: identifying the subject as the human and the actor as the algorithm. These two entities can also be seen through the political scientist and anthropologist James C. Scott’s perspective, with the subject as identity and the state as the actor. In Scott’s 1998 book Seeing Like A State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, he addresses the same action as Jarzombek; the duplication of a human through data. However, Scott sees this through the perspective of the state. Scott’s argument comes from seeing mass “sedentarization” as a method used by the state or a governing body to forcefully abstract the human.4 The major difference between Jarzombek and Scott’s representations are that Jarzombek’s representation is true to the identity of its subject and Scott’s heavily abstracts its subject into a political outline.5 Ontic exhaust is able to create and collect massive amounts of specific data that go on to accurately reflect the person creating it. What this means is that the digital trace of a person can be considered almost equal to the person while the political outline is a representation of the person according to an abstracted set of

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characteristics. These two are different examples of alternative representations of the human. Because of Jarzombek’s Digital Stockholm Syndrome, we can see a connection between pre-digital representations and data.

Thomas Jefferson’s Yeoman and Urban Planning An extreme political outline is Thomas Jefferson’s late 18th century Yeoman. As briefly described by Harvey M. Jacobs, the chair of Urban and Regional Planning at the University of Wisconsin, in Site Matters: Strategies for Uncertainty through Planning and Design, the Yeoman was an agrarian “family man” who owned private land.6 Jacobs uses the Yeoman as evidence that our methods of land ownership have greatly changed and will continue to change. These changes have large implications in how we think about the urban planning of cities.7 The Yeoman was turned into an alternative representation by Jefferson and the State through land survey maps dividing the land into square miles.

This gridded geographic subdivision was used to control not just the land but the planning of townships down to the scale of neighborhoods. Alternative representations of the human, similar to the maps drawn by land surveyor William E. Peters in 1918 for his book Ohio Lands and Their Subdivision, are now not only thought of as the control of the land but as the control of the human (see Figure 01). Because of Jarzombek’s Digital Stockholm Syndrome, we can see the connection between these maps and data. The maps and data while similar in intent are used differently. The Yeoman and their maps were created to mobilize Jefferson’s political agenda. As described by economist Lisa Krall in her essay, “Jefferson’s Agrarian Vision and the Changing Nature of Property,” Jefferson’s political agenda was to steal land from indigenous people and erase their histories. Jefferson’s alternative representation was created with harmful intent and Jarzombek’s alternative representation, data, has inherited a silhouette of this. Corporations and social platforms mine the data we create, the very same data that, as argued by Jarzombek, is equal to the human. What this means is that our data

is used by corporations and social platforms to curate the information we interact with and predict our behaviors.8 Information, people, and control

Figure 06: Gridded land subdivision meets a river and existing township.

Map of land subdivisions between Wood and Lucas counties, Ohio by William Edwards Peters, 1918.

There have been many attempts at large scale control similar to the Yeoman. Architectural Historian Siegfried Gideon argues in Mechanization Takes Command that mechanization has made us lose touch with ourselves. While Gideon covers many scales of mechanization, he focuses on its relationship with the human.9 One example Gideon provides are management consultants Frank and Lilian Gilbreth’s early 20th century Space Efficiency Studies. The result of the Gilbreths’ studies was a large increase in productivity, which lead to an increase in income over a shorter period of time.

These studies are a series of photographs of a person performing a task which is then mapped in physical space by sinuous metal lines (see Figure 02 and Figure 03). Gideon describes these studies as the rationalization of space which stands in support of Jefferson’s gridded land division.10 The Gilbreth’s studies shifted the concern of the early 20th century architectural movement ‘Scientific Management’ to form.11 The sinuous form unitized the worker, allowing people in power to take control of space.12 However, according to architect Max Kuo in The Advance of the Digital Frenemy, the over rationalization of space creates more problems than it is attempting to solve.13 Kuo goes further to claim that data’s “unruliness sabotages human control.”14 (100) Moving Gideon and Kuo further from each other are their perspectives on the influence that alternative representations have on aesthetic. Gideon draws connections between the Gilbreth’s motion study images and cubist painter Paul Klee. What Gideon does is create a relationship between analytical representations of the human and aesthetic expression. Kuo takes issue with the results of this relationship standing against the production of an image being directly tied to its use and expression. What Kuo does argue is that the two produce a whole new aesthetic, one where the identity of a human comes into question

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and is unable to control.15 Another example of control of the human and space is with contemporary global architecture, which are those who geographically relocate. Whether forced or voluntary, people bring with them the stories, identities, and practices of the place they left.

When someone arrives at another place, they are put through what Scott calls “sedentarization.”16 Anthropologist Arjun Appadurai’s argument in Modernity at Large stands at odds to Scott’s arguments in Seeing Like A State. Appadurai argues that we can fracture abstracted representations, or control of space, by turning towards technology and media.17 Appadurai and Scott are speaking about the same communities however, their arguments come from different perspectives. Scott argues they are forced to become citizens through geopolitical abstraction. Appadurai argues they are able to break free of geopolitical abstraction through media. In Modernity at Large, Appadurai goes on to describe these communities that have spread across the globe as diasporic. Although the people apart of these communities deal with geopolitical abstraction, they resist being controlled through the use of media such as film, television, music, and advertisements.18 Appadurai calls the spaces in which these media exist mediascapes.19 The architectural typologies in which these mediascapes exist are mainly domestic spaces, where people have the most control.20 Media allows space to be more flexible changing the surfaces of domestic interiors into whatever is projected onto them.

This, in turn, reprograms an existing space within a fixed volume. Opposite to Appadurai, Lacaton and Vassal and Herzog de Mueron have made attempts at reprogramming space.

Doubling Space Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s phrase “Less is more” became an aphorism for modernist architecture.21 While these words are still used today and are applicable to this discourse, the most recent Pritzker prize winning architects suggest an alternative. Anne Lacaton and Jean-Philippe

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Figure 07 (Top): Rendering the invisible visible of American industry.

Motion Efficiency Study photograph taken by Frank and Lillian Gilbreth 1920’s.

Figure 08 (above): Foreman using Drill Press.

Motion Efficiency Study photograph of a foreman using a drill press taken by Frank and Lillian Gilbreth, 1915.

Vassal repeatedly try to make more space with more architecture. Their building the FRAC NordPas de Calais in Dunkerque is an extreme example.

This contemporary art museum doubles the available space through literally building a copy of the original building using highly efficient ephemeral greenhouse building materials.22 (see figure 03) In a 2015 lecture at Harvard GSD by Anne Lacaton and Jean-Philippe Vassal called Freedom of Use, Vassal speaks towards the act of doubling space:23 Here inside [the existing building] was the energy, here inside was the work of the people, … so instead [of working] inside [the existing building] we make a double building, we install exactly the same building just on the side of the first one and we put the program [in] the new one in order to keep the first one totally empty…

Figure 09: Duplications and units of inheritance.

Photograph of FRAC Nord-Pas de Calais by Lacaton and Vassal in Dunkerque, France.

What Vassal means by this is that by doubling the amount of available space we can act on an increased number of programmatic possibilities.

They are creating a direct relationship between the volume of space and the number of possibilities in the space. They are also specific when they say the doubling of space is nost nostalgic, however, the duplication of a building calls attention to what it is reproducing just as data calls attention to the human creating it. Despite the radically different architectonic articulation of the new building containing program, it is the same form.24 Jean Baudrillard, a sociologist, philosopher, and cultural theorist concerned with simulacrum and representation, would possibly disagree with Lacaton and Vassal’s positions about a disconnect from nostalgia and duplication. As Baudrillard writes in his 1983 text Simulations, the duplication is possibly more authentic than the original. For the FRAC this means that the act of doubling allows us to examine more what the characteristics of the original. Lacaton and Vassal state earlier in the lecture that they insist on evaluating the amount of architecture necessary. They jokingly discuss a park where after months of analysis they decided to do nothing. While Lacaton and Vassal place emphasis on the process of evaluating architecture it seems

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as if they are inclined to create more space with more architecture.25 Another firm that doubles space is Herzog De Meuron. The Caixaforum Madrid built in 2008 and the Elbphilharmonie built in 2016 are their most extreme examples. While both are relevant to this discussion the Caixaforum predates the Elbphilharmonie.26 The form of the Caixaforum is a skewed rusted metal extrusion taking influence from the form of the surrounding context (see figure 04). The new building extrudes through the brick shell of a former power station subtracting out the former stations base for an extensive plaza.27 The Caixaforum doubles the amount of available space vertically with more architecture. The building like the FRAC engages the memory of what used to be there.28 While both of these buildings attempt to be flexible not only with their program but their engagement with the history of their site, they do so with an assumption that there are no available methods of creating more programmatic possibilities in the same volume of space. What this means is that the buildings suggest that there is a direct relationship between the volume of space and the number of programmatic possibilities. However according to architect Tatiana Knoroz in Devicology the use of a space can be greatly expanded and evolve over time. Knoroz’s analysis of a person’s home, in a “Japanese multistory mass housing estate built from the 1950’s into the late 1970’s” (37), examines the retrofitted furniture of an efficient housing unit.

Knoroz argues that people who live in such fixed conditions will find a way to make space more flexible, or rather, reprogrammable. Knoroz goes on to describe the series of multifunctional furniture as the “collective unconsciousness of people living in the same conditions with the same set of rules.”

(50) This contests Lacaton and Vassal and Herzog De Mueron’s philosophy that more space equals more program. Knoroz analysis is a diagrammatic expression of Appadurai’s diasporic communities in that people are able to reprogram a fixed volume of space.

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Figure 10: Extruding what used to be. Photograph of Caixaforum Madrid

by Herzog de Meuron in Madrid, Spain. Accessed November 11, 2021.

Conclusion The texts and images examined provide examples of alternative representations of the human being used to control and of the need to take control of our excess data today. Thomas Jefferson’s Yeoman and the Gilbreth’s Space Efficiency studies are pre-digital representations making evident the importance of the image and it’s medium. As discussed by Giedion, the photograph or rather the image is tied to a spatial regime whose medium dictates how space and humans will be controlled.29 These former spatial regimes were indirectly concerned with program such as the space planning of a factory or the zoning of a township. Following the rapid increase of technological advancement since the Gilbreth’s studies, Arjun Appadurai deconstructs diasporic communities revealing that their power lies within media or in Appadurai’s terms Mediascapes and Ideoscapes.30 An important distinction is its relationship we the adaptive reuse of space today.

Adaptive reuse is focused on reusing existing spaces and architecture. The reprogramming of space does deal with reusing existing spaces and architecture but could also be applied to designing new spaces and new architecture. The following design explorations explore how space can be doubled, how program can occupy a fixed volume, and the relationships between surface, volume, and domestic space.

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End Notes 1

Mark Jarzombek, Digital Stockholm Syndrome in the Post

Ontological Age (University of Minnesota Press, 2014), X 2

Objects that produce data could be computers, smart

thermostats, smart homes, and smart watches

10 11 12

Siegfried Giedion, Mechanization Takes Command, 101.

Giedion, Mechanization Takes Command, 100 As seen in figure 02 the form of the metal line allowed the

human and space to be controlled. To break it down further 3

Mark Jarzombek, X. While Jarzombek prefers the term Ontic

the white grid in the background helped assign coordinates to

Exhaust, experts prefer the term digital exhaust referring to

the metal line. This was then put through a series of equations

excess data.

and design iterations to make the task the creates the metal line as efficient as possible.

4

James, C. Scott. Seeing Like A State: How Certain Schemes

to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1998), 02. Sedentarization is not the focus of James C. Scotts Seeing Like A State however it is stated as the initial question leading to main content of the book.

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An example of a political outline is a citizen. As defined by

Merriam Webster’s Eleventh Edition is “a person who legally belongs to a country and has rights and protection of that country.” The data in the case of the citizen are their rights because rights are alternative representations of the person.

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The essay referenced is from the second edition of Site

13

Max Kuo, Advance of the Digital Frenemy (Anyone

Corporation, 2021), 100.

14 15 16

Kuo, Advance of the Digital Frenemy, 99-100, 111.

Kuo, Advance of the Digital Frenemy, 111.

As described earlier in this text sedentarization is a method

used by the state to make people citizens.

17

Arjun Appadurai, Modernity At Large: Cultural Dimensions of

Globalization (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press,

Matters published in 2021.

1996) 03.

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18

Harvey M, Jacobs, Claiming the Site: Ever Evolving Social-

Legal Conceptions of Ownership and Property (New York, Routledge, 2021), 15, 17. What Jacobs means when he connects the airport to changing conceptions of land ownership is that the airport is an international territory. This means that the space of an airport requires special laws and zoning.

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Instagram’s data policy page on their Help Center website

Arjun Appadurai, Modernity At Large: Cultural Dimensions of

Globalization, 32-35.

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Appadurai, Modernity At Large: Cultural Dimensions of

Globalization, 35.

20

Appadurai, Modernity At Large: Cultural Dimensions

of Globalization, 35-36. While Appadurai doesn’t directly

directly states the use of data: “to personalize features

attribute mediascapes to domestic spaces he heavily

and context and to make suggestion for you on and off our

discusses state created media. The state created media is

products.” (help.instagram.com/519522125107875/?helpref=uf_

completely out of control of the citizen attributing control to

share). The reason Instagram is a good example is because

the domestic space.

of their large user base and they were recently acquired by Facebook.

21

The term less is more was first printed in 1855 by Robert

Browning in a Poem titled Andrea del Sarto and was then 9

Siegfried Giedion, Mechanization Takes Command (New York,

Oxford University Press, 1948), 6.

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popularized by Mies van der Rohe in the early to mid-20th century.

22

Anne Lacaton, Jean-Philippe Vassal, FRAC Nord-Pas de

Calais (https://www.lacatonvassal.com/index.php?idp=61, 2021), text description in English.

23

Anne Lacaton, Jean-Philippe Vassal, Freedom of Use (Guest

Lecturer, Harvard Graduate School of Design, March 25 2015), 00:31:46 – 00:31:24.

24

Jean Baudrillard, Simulations (Columbia University,

Semiotext[e], 1983), 12.

25

Lacaton and Vassal have many other projects that do this

same thing such as 530 logements Grand Parc, Maison Latapie, and Les Grands ensembles de logements.

26

These two building not only have architectural and

representational overlap, but the conceptual and project phases chronologically overlap revealing a strong connection between the two projects. Why the Caixaforum is discussed more here is because it came before the Elbphilharmonie.

27

Herzog De Meuron, 201 Caixaforum Madrid: Text. See

the buildings description on their website: https://www. herzogdemeuron.com/index/projects/complete-works/201225/201-caixaforum-madrid.html 28

Meuron, 201 Caixaforum Madrid: Text. The building used to be

a power plant. What remains is a shell of the brick façade.

29 30

Giedion, Mechanization Takes Command, 06, 99-103 Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of

Globalization, 35-36.

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Broader Questions Architectural Bracketing Proposal

Figure 11: Sticky Note Sketch by Carol Burns, 2021. Accessed December 2, 2021. (CCBY Jack H. Foisey)

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CHAPTER 03

Design as Research 01

Urban planning precedent analysis Analysis of the role of information in architecture

Introduction Following the previous chapter, the alternative representation is explored through a series of design tests and repositioned to focus on the position and exchange of digital information.

This chapter serves as a index of explorations through framing, making, and drawing. Precedents that engaged the ground and collected were studied. The grid was then explored as not only a representation of the Yeoman but as an infrastructural system. Next came browsing through ArcGIS data dissemination throughout the United States of America and Europe.

These public file systems are structures of public dissemination of data representing the land and built. Casting plaster took on perspectives of formal reproduction creating surface, volume, and material in one action. The casts became a physical method of representation. The casted blocks became diagrams for an abstracted list of possible collective concerns. This suggested a list of socioeconomic expectations of domestic space today.

Following these diagrams were a short list of case studies. Places such as Garden City Kansas, Helsinki Finland, and the Lower East Side of Manhattan as seen through arcGIS. What all of these explorations revealed was the importance of land or ground and an age, place, and value.

As the making, drawing, and framing continued a thread of inquiry and similarity emerged: how do domestic collectives live today? how can we engage with their modernist legacies, especially

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in the information age and into the future? what characterizes collective spaces today and what could they look like and how could they perform? what are their modernist legacies and how do they impact us today?

The methods used to visualize these explorations were, site maps, collages, historic images, renderings, plaster, and media. These methods allowed a multi-scalar and multi-material series of explorations to be generative. The general framing of the chapter came from a sketch by Carol Burns allowing the search to accommodate multiple lines of inquire at the same time (see figure 11).

Mind/Mirror September 24th 2021, Manhattan, New York, Whitney Museum of American Art. Mind/Mirror a surprise oeuvre of Jasper Johns work. The collection was curated to occupy itself just as Johns work was concerned with doubling1. Visiting the collection came as a surprise. On a global travel studio trip to Manhattan to investigate small scale social spaces we visited the Whitney Museum of American Art on the second to last day. The Whitney, overcrowded with Manhattan’s art community and Whitney Members was displaying a large retrospective of John’s work. That particular visit was during their pre-opening member’s only admission. This was now known until after carefully spending time being completely removed from reality by the collection.

The inclusion of this exhibition, and precarious visit, are necessary to set the backdrop to the initial explorations of the thesis and parallel studio.

12) is Two Maps made in 1965. Two Maps is two similar maps vertically stacked. The maps were created using the same method - encaustic and collage - forcing a reflection on what representation, art, symbol, and geographic information is. John’s contemplation of doubling and abstracting was done so with a high degree of philosophical concern.

While most of these works depicted maps of the United States, targets, and flags the surfacing question is how can an object occupy itself?

Robert Rauschenberg’s (Johns and Rauschenberg history together is another layer of coincidence) combines explored similar questions. Yoicks was the only work from Rauschenberg on display at the Whitney, an unknown footnote to Mind/ Mirror.

The piece (classified as a painting on whitney. org/collection/works/8) makes use of paper, paint, polyester, enamel, and canvas. The piece despite it’s multi-medium creation is not apart of Rauschenberg’s combines. The combines were vivid explorations into multi-media mainly occupying the surface off the canvas. The two suggest the canvas and the message as a ground to be explored literally

As described in the wall description, John’s obsessively duplicated banal objects, or “... things the mind already knows” 2 The double panel painting on the right (see figure

1

Description provided by the Whitney Museum of American Art.

(https://whitney.org/exhibitions/jasper-johns) 2

Description provided by the Whitney Museum of American Art.

(https://whitney.org/exhibitions/jasper-johns)

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Figure 12 (top and left): Jasper Johns, Two Maps, 1965. Encaustic and collage on canvas (two panels), 90 1/8 × 70 1/4 in. (228.9 × 178.4 cm)

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Landscape Running parallel to this thesis and the reason I had the chance to visit the Whitney when I did was because of a travel studio about landscape, specifically small urban spaces such as pocket parks. For the studio I engaged questions around the preservation of a physical archive, the New York Public Library Photo Collection. The collection, earlier last year, was going to be permanently archived and removed from public access until Tyrn Simon and the library goers protested. The proposal for the studio was a permanent location for the growing collection and a public park that extends the collections use. The proposal thought of the wall as a responsible and irresponsible steward of the ground. The proposal served as an exploration for some of the topics and ideas surrounding my thesis exploration. The top down oblique (right) of Manhattan shows the location of the site relative to the Schwartzmann branch and an exploded axon (right) of the proposal showing the multi-layered new ground for the site.

Conclusion The following explorations served as the base for the final thesis proposal building off the context set in the introduction and motivation to follow my interests and engage an issue through architecture.

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Figure 13 (far right): Elements, Exploded axon of global studio proposal. Image accessed, April 21st, 22. (CCBY Jack H. Foisey)

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Description provided by the Whitney Museum of American Art.

(https://whitney.org/exhibitions/jasper-johns) 2

Description provided by the Whitney Museum of American Art.

(https://whitney.org/exhibitions/jasper-johns)

Figure 14: Site relation, Top down axon of Manhattan. Image accessed, April 21st, 22. (CCBY Jack H. Foisey)

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Precedents The precedents chosen to study and guide the thesis engaged questions around the ground, program, architecture, and information.

The precedents were sketched through analyzing their architectural drawings, renders, and built photographs. The sketches produced culiminated in parti diagrams that suggested a relationship to the ground, program, and collective.

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Land Subdivision Status: In effect in 1918 Year: 1918 Location: Ohio, United States of America Cartographer: Peter E. William Size: n/a The land division maps and land surveys produced following the geo-political creation of the Yeoman served as the initial production of geographic information for mass dissemination associated with a value. The array of maps here were deconstructed revealing a layering system attempting to constrain the existing conditions such as rivers, mountains, and existing town buildings.

Peter E. William, a cartographer, created maps subdividing the land in Ohio to be sold. The maps serve as an early precedent of defining a physical entity through a non-physical practice.

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Figure 15: Ohio land subdivision maps documenting various locations and their division, Ohio by William Edwards Peters.

Between Miami Rivers

Delaware Salt Reservation

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Aa / Bb: Plan and elevation of verticle facade and wood construction

Middle: Image of North Pump Bottom left: Section through North Pump

North Pump

East Pump

South Pump

Top: Parti Bottom: Tactic

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Skjern River Pump Status: Built Year: 2015 Location: Ringkobing-Skjern, Denmark Architect(s): Johansen Skovsted Arkitekter Size: n/a The Skjern River Pumps are three river pumps left over from the river’s drainage in the 1960’s. Proposed were exhibition spaces and view points highlighting Europes largest natural restoration project to date. What these pump houses represent is architectures interaction with the ground and restoration or change over time.

The pumps reach down through the houses into the ground to control the water flow. The architecture of the houes supported this until Johansen Skovsted Arkitekter (JSA) repositioned them to highlight their effects.

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Figure 16 (top): Building Anatomy. Elevation, plan, and section alligned.

Elevation photo by JSA in Ringkobing-Skjern, Denmark, 2015. Image accessed, April, 23rd, 2022

Figure 17 (top): Aerail Restoration. An aerial view of the Skjern River in 1960 and in 2020. Image accessed, April, 23th, 2022 Figure 18 (above): Ground and Architecture. Image accessed, April, 23rd, 2022

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Park de la Villette Status: Unbuilt Year: 1982 Location: Paris, France Architect(s): OMA Size: 5,700,000 Sq m.

The proposal for the infamous Park de la Villette competition by OMA became a precedent for how to think about horizontal surface and program. The strategy, strips, was drawn through revealing the axial privilege given to program while rendering the ground as a flat surface. Permeability, as suggested by OMA, became a word to describe threshold associated with program. How can program permeate and infiltrate other programs? where are the lines drawn between them? and what is between them?

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Figure 19 (top): Strips.

Rendered view of a Parc de la Villette by OMA, 1982.

Image accessed, January, 20th, 2022 Figure 20 (right): Strip sketch. Image accessed, April 21st, 2022

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520 Logoments Status: Built Year: 2017 Location: Bordeaux, France Architect(s): Lacaton and Vassal Size: Buildings G,H, I Grand Parc District Lacaton and Vassal attempt to have all of the same program within a villa in a typical domestic space through the use of more architecture, specifically green house tectonic. However, Lacaton and Vassal omit an important influence today: information in the domestic space. Lacaton and Vassal’s diagrams were broken down, rearranged, and materialized to explore different possibilities through their approach. The resulting collages suggested that architectonic be associated with program. This opened up questions about how architecture articulates a programmed space. do specific programs require specific architectectonic if so should they?

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Figure 21 (top): Doubled Architecture. A ground perspective view facing the front of the FRAC by Lacaton and Vassal in Dunkerque, France, 2015 Figure 22 (right): More Architecture. Image accessed, April 21st, 2022

Collaged 01

Collaged 01 RCP

Collaged 02

Collaged 02 RCP

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Bole Rwanda Status: Unbuilt Year: 2019 Location: Addis Ababa, Ethiopia Architect(s): AD-WO Size: 4,000 Sq m.

Bole Rwanda explores the wall and corridor as a space for interaction and building performance.

The living space is divided into private and corridor, a space for individuality and a space for collectivity.

The exterior wall is used as a scrim and shading device to mediate sun exposure deep into the building. The corridor wraps the living space sliding inbetween the facade and private spaces. This provides more space for the residents to collect.

The final diagram of the building is a permeable box encasing verticle and horizontal movement.

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Figure 23 (top): Bole Rwanda. A ground perspective view facing the front of the aparment building by AD-WO in Addis, Ababa, Ethiopia, 2019.

Figure 24 (right): Four Elements Sketch. Image accessed, April 20th, 2022.

Living Space The living space is allocated in the center with a corridor running through. The elevators are just below the geometric center of the building.

Material There are three different types of walls: exterior, interior, and service. The exterior wall is punctured with the interior walls offset making room for a corridor that wraps the entire living space. The service walls are the elevators or core of the building.

Corridor The corridor works with the exterior wall to filter people, light, community, and service. The corridor takes on more responsibility acting as a place of congregation rather than movement.

Diagram The diagram of the building is 3 vertical axis witih less defined horizontal axis bounded by a dashed skin.

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yeoman

program dwelling

laborer

element surface

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machine

material

derive

form

traveler

circulation

Characters labor leisure

fenestration

Following precedent analysis a set of characters were established and explored spatially through a casted block of plaster and 2 drawings each. The characters were defined by a culmination of characteristics of each precedent. Each casted block represented a general concern of space: material, ownership, economic, mental. These were arranged according to the orders from the previous explorations. This method was used in order to determine what was of most concern in the production of space with each character.

solid wall

tectonic stereotomic intensive extensive expectation lines

vertical horizontal

Figure 25 (right): Characters. Image accessed, April 21, 2022.

(CCBY Jack H. Foisey) Figure 26 (above): Characters 2. Image accessed, December 8, 2021. (CCBY Jack H. Foisey)

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Information and Architecture Following the analysis of precedents, the role of information and architecture were taken as broad topics of exploration.

Examined was how and where is digital information used in architecture? how is the ground rendered by information? what formats does this information come in? A catalog of information was created to identify where information plays a role in domestic spaces. ArcGIS was used to explore visualizing the ground and built. A manifesto, analytique, and artifact were created as summations of the many explorations done during the initial work of this thesis.

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Catalog A catalog of technology and the flow of information in architecture and space helped identify and organize how information engages bodies, architecture, and space. Tieing all of these together is the flow of information through signals.

Information travels through physical material wirelessly attenuating (attenuation is the strength of material through a material). This catalog and understanding of the movement of information served as a lens to look at the domestic collective.

A typical domestic space, the suburban home, was exploded to expose all of it’s systems and reveal the most used types of information and devices. This exercise helped define how and where information moves in relation to daily life.

Figure 27: Catalog of Information. Image accessed, April 21th, 2022.

(CCBY Jack H. Foisey)

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Technology Embedded in the Domestic Space Sources: - Wifi Router - Cable Box - Physical Broadband Cable Tied in/Direct: - Wahser - Dryer - Door (Lock) - Thermostat - Lights - Window (Lock) - Air Quality (HVAC) Augment: - Television - Computer (laptop/desktop) - Bookshelf* - Camera (Surveillence) - Hub Unsure: - Fire Place - Lawn

* = Analog

Material Characteristics Amplify Redirect Cancel Dampen Distort Rearrange Receive Send

Structure Thermal Mass Light Shadow Texture Color Microclimate Ornament

Figure 28: Exploded Domestic Space and Catalog. Image accessed, April 21th, 2022. (CCBY Jack H. Foisey)

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Cartography An emerging practice in architecture is the use of ArcGIS or digital mapping tools. The tool is fast becoming a common practice in architecture firms.

Here, it was used to understand how geographic information is used in architecture and planning to characterize a physical location. Relating back to the catalog of information, the maps to the left (from left: Helsinki Finland, Garden City Ohio, Paris France) revealed the inner workings of information and how architectural practices, such as the characterization of space, plays into socio-political boundaries. The relevance of understanding how socio-political boundaries were defined helped characterize domestic collectives later in the thesis exploration. Without this crucial step a broader understanding of community and state boundaries would not have been grasped.

Figure 29: Helsinki, Garden City, Paris. Image accessed, April 21, 2022. (CCBY Jack H. Foisey)

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Scenario 01 Scenario 01 is the title of the initial thesis explorations analytique. The image displays a domestic collective whose interior surface, volume, and program are highlighted. The spaces themselves are articulated through two types of tectonic: typical studs and space frames. The image helped visualize the big take aways from initial explorations such as exchanges between collectivity and program.

Figure 30: Scenario 01.

Image accessed, April 21, 2022. (CCBY Jack H. Foisey)

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Cast, bound, object (surface, volume, material) Continuing down the line of making with a cast and plaster, Cast, bound, object is a cast block of plaster and an acrylic cast unbound. The artifact represents one collective action resulting in many different outputs such as: volume, surface, material, form, and cast.

Figure 31: Cast, bond, object (surface, volume, material). Image accessed, December 8, 2021. (CCBY Jack H. Foisey)

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The Domestic Interior The Domestic Interior is a manifesto about domestic space today written with the purpose of creating a strict set of rules for architecture.

The manifesto featured itself as a cover wrapped in plastic and a bar code as if it were marketed and sold or disseminated as media. This was a reference to the manifesto as media or something consumable in a capitalist/late capitalist economy.

The manifesto features explorations into signal attenuation through material, modernist and postmodernist housing collectives, and the architectural promenade. This was a large turning point for the thesis as it provided a specific age, place, and value to explore and design.

Figure 32: The Domestic Interior. Image accessed, April 21, 2022. (CCBY Jack H. Foisey)

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Figure 33: Site node sketch.

Image accessed, April 21, 2022. (CCBY Jack H. Foisey)

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CHAPTER 04

Design as Research 02

Site Selection Site Analysis Design Tests

Introduction This chapter explores a synthesis of the previous Design as Research 01, chapter 03, exploring an age, place, and value. This synthesis can also be characterized as a commitment to a specific line of inquiry, housing, information, and material.

Manhattan was chosen as the larger context for this thesis for it’s history of experimental housing, settlement houses, and optimistic aspirations.

Seward Park Cooperative became the specific site for it’s history within Urban Renewal, density, and set of fragmented urban intensities modulating daily life. Four strategies were developed to explore the possibilities for the site and thesis. This set of explorations culminate in a new ground for Seward Park.

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Manhattan Experimental housing, dense living conditions, and a city that’s built on landfill, infrastructure, and diversity became the larger context for this thesis. Manhattan experienced drastic demolition and displacement from 1940 till around 1970. The 1949 Housing Act created legal definitions for communities, labeling them as “slums”. This allowed the systemic destruction of communities to be legal and promoted. What replaced these communities were housing cooperatives and the tower in the park typology breaking from the Manhattan grid.

Along the Lower East Side of Manhattan sits a number of these housing cooperatives. These cooperatives have varying ownership structures but all follow a top down hierarchy. The models start from buying into an entity that provides housing not directly owning a space. Amenities are included but don’t reflect the lives on the residents. The context serves as an amenity substitute but is the only connection between theses cooperatives and their context.

Figures 34-37: Manhattan in a few formats. Images accessed, April 21, 2022.

(CCBY Jack H. Foisey)

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Seward Park Community Center Seward Park High School Ramiken VinVero Wines and Spirits Francois ghebaly Grand Cutter Barber Shop Loho Realty and Concierge Saluggi’s East Levitt Pharmacy Tribeca Pediatrics Citi Bank May May Kitchen Metro Acres Market USPS Post Office Clinton Variety

FedEx Drop Box The Pickle Guys Diller Friedman’s Pizza School NYC Kossar’s Bagels and Bialys Doughnut Plant

Seward Park Housing

Seward Park

New York Public Library Seward Park

Parking Garage

Seward Park Cooperative The site for this thesis is Seward Park Housing which is located in the Lower East Side where the grid comes to a point and where the Manhattan and Williamsburg Bridge land. Seward Park was completed in 1960 following the completion of East River Housing (located just down the street) and was designed by Herman J. Jessor with consulting from SOM, and Robert Moses. East River Housing was a competition for new housing along the east river. It was the first housing cooperative to be organized and sponsored by a union, the amalgamated Clothing Workers Union. Around the same time of the East River Competition, Settlement Houses were becoming more prominent in the area, which are places where community advocacy and help were provided. Seward Park Housing is directly connected to this history.

This housing initially came in the form of a booklet detailing location, proposal, effect, and

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displacement. The development displaced 1,494 families and sits where the original Seward Park was. The site before renewal was extremely dense with about 600 people / acer. The neighborhood was a minority neighborhood with many Jewish residences and businesses. The development cleared the area but has remained mostly the same since. The park today is made up of playgrounds, sports/recreation spaces, and a branch of the New York Public Library.

Figure 38 (top right): Discursive Seward Park.

Image accessed, April 22, 2022. (CCBY Jack H. Foisey) Figure 39 (above): Seward Park: Slum Clearance.

Booklet detailing proposal Image accessed, April 21, 2022. (CCBY Jack H. Foisey)

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Attenuation The buildings were tested to visualize and understand their performance with digital information. An essential question guiding this was: how do existing domestic collectives exchange with digital information? The yellow gradients represent signals (like wifi) attenuation or signal strength through modern materials. These tests helped characterize the spatial opportunities and consequences of rethinking how we live with digital information and more importantly how could we live with digital information.

The building was tested at three scales: corridor, unit, and a set of architectural elements. Each were exploded to understand their material layers and how/where digital information is exchanged.

Figures 40-42: Signal Attenuation at 3 scales.

Image accessed, April 21, 2022. (CCBY Jack H. Foisey)

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Strategies Following the site analysis, four strategies were developed: Infill, Wrap, Density, and Ground. All four follow a set of criteria that attempt to integrate digital information into existing domestic collectives while appropriately engaging the existing social, political, and infrastructural context.

Through each strategy, infrastructure and a model began to take shape and become more clear after each test to frame this thesis. The most difficult thing to make clear and materialize was a set of program that comes from the inclusion of digital information.

The program and the model became central to the thesis generating an architecture and urban plan.

Infill

Wrap

Density

Figure 43 (top): Node Sketch.

Image accessed, April 21, 2022. (CCBY Jack H. Foisey) Figure 44 (right): Strategies.

Image accessed, April 21, 2022. (CCBY Jack H. Foisey) Figure 45 (far right): Array of tests ad sketches. Image accessed, April 21, 2022.

(CCBY Jack H. Foisey)

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Ground

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Infill The four buildings in Seward Park are three crosses tied together by a party wall that runs the height of the building. Infill is oriented at the voids between the crosses turning the building into a box similar to a social condenser. The infill consists of floor plates and columns that support various programs.

While the infill increased density and engaged a social condenser type it greatly lowered overall living conditions and superficially included digital information into the collective. The infill was represented through floor plans and axonometrics in an attempt to communicate their spatial relationships. The axonometrics (on the next pages) served as working vertical diagrams to understand how the infill was working from floor to floor.

Figure 46 (top): Infill Diagram. Image accessed, April 21, 2022. (CCBY Jack H. Foisey) Figure 47 (right): Attenuation Plans. Image accessed, April 21, 2022.

(CCBY Jack H. Foisey) Figure 48 (far right): Existing floor and unit plans. Image accessed, April 21, 2022.

(CCBY Jack H. Foisey)

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Typical Floor Plan

Unit Types

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Figure 49 (far right): Infill Test 05. Image accessed, April 21, 2022. (CCBY Jack H. Foisey)

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Figure 50 (far right): Infill Test 02. Image accessed, April 21, 2022. (CCBY Jack H. Foisey)

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Wrap The wrap surrounds the perimeter of the building as an occupiable edge. The wrap consists of floor plates, columns, and vertical circulation that support various programs and communal connection.

While the wrap greatly increased density and promoted multi-floor connections the wrap decreased living conditions such as sunlight, and air circulation. While the wrap was unsuccessful due to it’s effects on living conditions it did begin to suggest an idea about how to engage the buildings, their context, and how they were perceived. The section on the following page displays the wraps interaction with daily life and with the movement of information.

Figure 51 (top): Wrap Diagram.

Image accessed, April 21, 2022.

(CCBY Jack H. Foisey) Figure 52 (right): Wrap Test.

Image accessed, April 21, 2022.

(CCBY Jack H. Foisey) Figure 53 (far top right): Infill Perspective. Image accessed, April 21, 2022. (CCBY Jack H. Foisey) Figure 54 (far right): Wrap Elements. Image accessed, April 21, 2022. (CCBY Jack H. Foisey)

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Perspective

Wrap Elements

Copper Screen

Wooden Louvers

Wrap Structure

Sliding Panels

Verticle Circulation

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Figure 55: Infill Section. Image accessed, April 21, 2022.

(CCBY Jack H. Foisey)

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Ground Ground looks at the physical ground between the buildings. The existing ground consists of Manhattan infrastructure layered with informal urbanism and communities.

Engaging the ground provided an opportunity to blur the boundary between the cooperative and it’s context while improving the quality of life. Existing on the site are moments of the ground being challenged: sewer caps, parking garage, playground, subway station, and water tower. In it’s current state the ground is ignored as a space for intervention being divided up by a series of gates and fractured urban intensities. By engaging the ground the relationship between figure and ground can include body and infrastructure Two main tests were done to figure out to which degree is the program underground, which program is underground, and how it engages the existing conditions. Many iterations of each helped to frame the site plan. Guiding questions were centered around increasing site access, connections to the towers and garage, and drawing in the Manhattan grid and it’s manifold context.

Figure 56 (top): Ground Diagram. Image accessed, April 21, 2022. (CCBY Jack H. Foisey)

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Figure 57: Ground Section Axon. Image accessed, April 21, 2022.

(CCBY Jack H. Foisey)

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Figure 58: Ground Tests.

Image accessed, April 21, 2022. (CCBY Jack H. Foisey)

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Figure 59 (above): Infrastructure Sketch.

Image accessed, April 21, 2022.

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Interior Wall

Information Flow Server Rack Raised Floor Information, Air Flow

Folding Facade Facilitating exchange between the towers, ground, and residents is a layered folding facade.

The facade or envelope was explored as an architectural element that defined inside and outside, program, and building performance.

The facade initially housed structure, HVAC, envelop, and shading. All of these systems in the facade made it deep and overly engineered. Due to the constraints of long term expansion and contraction of the computation center and public program the structure and envelope became separate systems.

This, in turn, allowed the facade to take on more ‘folding’ properties becoming lighter and thinner.

Figure 60 (top): Perspective Section Exploded Facade. Image accessed, April 21, 2022. (CCBY Jack H. Foisey) Figure 61 (right): Folding Facade.

Image accessed, April 21, 2022.

(CCBY Jack H. Foisey)

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Structure Inputs/Outputs

Copper Mesh

04

01

02 03 05 06 04

01 02 03 05

01

01

01

01

01

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The Domestic Collective The final test is a proposal for a new collective ownership model for Seward Park Cooperative. The cooperative becomes a public shared infrastructure. Shareholders are anyone who is in need of information storage and computing.

The cooperative residents remain the foundational owners and receive a guaranteed share free to do whatever they’d like with it. As a collective they receive a percentage of the profits from the use of the computing center. These profits are put towards improving, editing, and evaluating shared living facilities and infrastructure. Buried beneath the park and towers are the computing centers, a space dedicated to the collection, organization, and dissemination of digital information.

The center reaches up through the ground stitching together a new ground of shared cyclical infrastructure. Water, heat, electricity, and information all pass through and create a new ground. As time moves the use of the space, not allocated for modular expansion and compression, are maintained, and arranged by the residents, their collective and individual demands/values materialized. What this does is redefine ownership, values, and exchange as a shared infrastructure not diametric to a shifting context. The image on the following spread, analytique, is a summation of this chapter displaying scales of consideration.

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Figure 62 (top): Ownership model. Image accessed, April 21, 2022. (CCBY Jack H. Foisey) Figure 63 (above): Figure, ground, infrastructure. Image accessed, April 21, 2022. (CCBY Jack H. Foisey) Figure 64 (far right): Section Perspective. Image accessed, April 21, 2022. (CCBY Jack H. Foisey)

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Figure 65: Analytique.

Image accessed, April 21, 2022. (CCBY Jack H. Foisey)

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Representation A struggle throughout the exploration of the thesis was representing signals, infrastructure, and daily life. The final result was a collage of yellow, blue, green, red, wood render, brick render, and photo realism.

To explore the thesis the axonometric, section, and exploded axon became the main drawing types and glitch became a method of engaging the pixel and image as a digital production.

Figures 66: Signals. Image accessed, April 21, 2022. (CCBY Jack H. Foisey) Figures 67: Seward Park Tower.

Image accessed, April 21, 2022.

(CCBY Jack H. Foisey)

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Signal Attenuation

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Geometry Glitch

Figures 68: Garage Section.

Image accessed, April 21, 2022. (CCBY Jack H. Foisey)

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Region Iridescent Map Render Brute force noise

Pixelation

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Figures 69: New structure plan. Image accessed, April 21, 2022. (CCBY Jack H. Foisey)

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wood texture

brick texture

60% | 925c5b

b4b6a5

6496ad

d5b153 83

Review Panel: Ang Li Principle Ang LI Projects, Assistant Professor of Architecture | Northeastern Antonio Furgiuele Associate Professor of Architecture | WIT Eli Keller PhD History, Theory and Criticism of Architecture and Art MIT | MIT John Ellis Professor of Architecture | WIT Mark Mulligan Associate Dean of the School of Architecture and Design | WIT Marie Law Adams Co-Founder Landing Studio, Lecturer MIT | MIT Penn Ruderman Principle OPRCH, Critic RISD, Adjunct WIT | RISD, WIT

Ground

Figure 70: Ground Diagram.

Image accessed, April 21, 2022. (CCBY Jack H. Foisey)

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CHAPTER 05

Outcomes

Presentation Boards Models Notes Introduction This chapter displays the final thesis presentation and details the final thesis proposal.

The proposal is a new ground for Seward Park. A computation center whose inputs and outputs such as hot and cool air, energy, and water is exchanged with the inputs and outputs of the residential towers, hot and cool air, energy, and water. While the center is located below ground a few structures push through creating more public flexible space and space for the residents to exchange information and ideas. This is worked into the ownership model of the collective in which the cooperative becomes a public shared infrastructure. Shareholders are anyone who is in need of information storage and computing. The cooperative residents remain the foundational owners and receive a guaranteed share free to do whatever they’d like with it.

Exchange becomes outside, everything, communal, obligatory, and positive representing new ways of living where the residents can reorganize the building and new structures to accommodate their collective demands and aspirations. What this does is create new spatial possibilities and ownership that act on the room created the characteristics of an age, place, and value.

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Final presentation and boards The final presentation took place is Watson Auditorium. The thesis was presented in a digital presentation, 3 55”x82” boards, a site model, and testing models.

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87

Final site model

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Script:

Figure 71 (top): Section Model 01. Image accessed, April 21, 2022. (CCBY Jack H. Foisey) Figure 72 (left): Section Model Aerial. Image accessed, April 21, 2022.

(CCBY Jack H. Foisey)

The Domestic Collective: A New Ground for Shared Life 2.5 Quintillin bytes of information are created every day. There are 4.66 billion internet users whose individual information is stored across numerous data centers. There are 2,506 housing cooperatives in Manhattan New York, which does not account for the number of buildings or number of residents. $1,640 the estimated value of Seward Park Cooperatives collective information with no incentive. With incentive that number in infinitely higher. These statistics seemingly random characterize an age, place, and value which together construct a context and an architecture.

This context and architecture are as undefined as possible where each, context and architecture, take on new sites to intervene. The over arching theme of these statistics and our context is media and information and how they exchange with and change the ways in which we live and the built environment.

New models of living are no stranger to architecture. Namely the modernists and post ww2 economics developers and city officials. Modern values clashed with capitalist pressures to consume, abstract, and demolish.

The tower in the park typology, also known as the cooperative, became a new unit of urban fabric even in the rigid grid of Manhattan. These cooperatives reorganized not only built fabric but communal resources, amenities funding, and outlook.

This optimistic reorganization, however, became the demolition and displacement of communities. Specifically, in the lower east side of Manhattan. A number of cooperatives were constructed, therefore a number of communities demolished, and an even larger number of people displaced. This is the agenda of modernism and capitalism, consumption, and reorganization atop a rich ground. Which brings us to the question: how can we engage these cooperatives today?

While most perspective on the products of modernism and capitalism are negative it did construct a catalyst for information and the possibility of shared resources and space facilitated by architecture. Today we see late capitalism and the sharing economy engaging these collectives on new grounds. One collective in particular is Seward Park Cooperative, the site for this thesis which proposes burying a computation center underneath Seward Park, 3 structures to facilitate exchange, and an ownership model for the residents.

Built in 1960 and funded by workers unions and government aid the cooperative sits within a network of tower in the park typologies left over from the blurry area between modernism and post-modernism. They were built with cheap concrete and brick construction and optimism that these new collectives would introduce a “modern” way of living. Some of the optimism surrounding these cooperatives may have come from Settlement Houses paving a way for lower income housing and services based on communal support.

The cooperatives offered a shared ownership model, a potential resident could apply to buy a share of a corporation. Depending on the specific ownership model the resident may then pay a monthly maintenance fee. These ownership models were a way to control rent prices and had the initial potential of offering affordable housing.

Built into the architecture and ownership was the idea of a fractured amenity, relying on the character of the direct context to supplement communal amenities. This minimized public and social space on site albeit creating the scaffolding for local businesses to thrive.

This is Seward Park.

The cooperative, through its name abstracts itself to it’s typology, a tower and park. This is far from the case, where the public park is a fraction of the site, commercial and residential zoning mix, parking occupies a large corner, and a majority of the site is fenced.

The site is bound by the Williamsburg and Manhattan bridges.

Within the park are sports facilities, A parking garage, and MTA stop.

This is the tower in the park today a series of fragmented urban intensities.

The 21 story residential towers are home to about 4,500 people. The street, in this photo grand st., is like a typical New York block layered with movement and businesses. The building is made up of 4 unit typologies and 3 cores whose performance with the exchange of information, signals/wifi, is mapped along with a set of standard elements.

Within the park is a series of paths and landscaped spaces sectioned off by program.

Facilitating all of this exchange is the ground modulating between zoning group, program, surface, movement, and infrastructure.

The proposal is for a new ground for Seward Park.

A computation center whose inputs and outputs such as hot and cool air, energy, and water is exchanged with the inputs and outputs of the residential towers, hot and cool air, energy, and water. While the center is located below ground a few structures push through creating more public flexible space and space for the residents to exchange information and ideas.

This is worked into the ownership model of the collective: The cooperative becomes a public shared infrastructure. Shareholders are anyone who is in need of information storage and computing. The cooperative residents remain the foundational owners and receive a guaranteed share free to do whatever they’d like with it.

Exchange becomes outside, everything, communal, obligatory, and positive representing new ways of living where the residents can reorganize the building and new structures to quite their collective demands and aspirations.

As a collective they receive a percentage of the profits from the use of the computing center.

These profits are put towards improving, editing, and evaluating shared living facilities and infrastructure.

The structures that push through are a modular heavy timber and copper scrim system that facilitates the expansion and contraction of the computation center and the exchanges of people, water, air, and information.

Those who choose to live in this collective are opting into the maintenance that’s required to support this ownership model and the computation center.

The spaces created by the center take over the existing parking garage, a node within the site, connecting the horizontal and vertical axis of the cooperative and the proposal.

The collective and computation center privilege collective living such as co-housing or communal housing taking advantage of the increased creation of information by the residence and the shared inputs and outputs of the computation center and residents. What this does is create new spatial possibilities and ownership that act on the room created the characteristics of an age, place, and value.

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Existing site This is Seward Park. The cooperative, through its name abstracts itself to it’s typology, a tower and park. This is far from the case, where the public park is a fraction of the site, commercial and residential zoning mix, parking occupies a large corner, and a majority of the site is fenced. The site is bound by the Williamsburg and Manhattan bridges.

Within the park are sports facilities, A parking garage, and MTA stop. This is the tower in the park today a series of fragmented urban intensities. The 21 story residential towers are home to about 4,500 people. The street, in this photo grand st., is like a typical New York block layered with movement and businesses. The building is made up of 4 unit typologies and 3 cores whose performance with the exchange of information, signals/wifi, is mapped along with a set of standard elements.

Within the park is a series of paths and landscaped spaces sectioned off by program. Facilitating all of this exchange is the ground modulating between zoning group, program, surface, movement, and infrastructure.

Figure 73 (above): Existing site plan. Image accessed, April 21, 2022. (CCBY Jack H. Foisey) Figure 74 (right): Site paths.

Image accessed, April 21, 2022. (CCBY Jack H. Foisey) Figure 75 (far right): Grand Street. Image accessed, April 21, 2022. (CCBY Jack H. Foisey)

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Site Plan

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Figure, ground, infrastructure The proposal is for a new ground for Seward Park. A computation center whose inputs and outputs such as hot and cool air, energy, and water is exchanged with the inputs and outputs of the residential towers, hot and cool air, energy, and water. While the center is located below ground a few structures push through creating more public flexible space and space for the residents to exchange information and ideas. This calls into play the figure ground drawing, a drawing type that display public and private space as solid and void.

Added here is infrastructure.

Built into the architecture and ownership was the idea of a fractured amenity, relying on the character of the direct context to supplement communal amenities. This minimized public and social space on site albeit creating the scaffolding for local businesses to thrive.

Figure 76 (above): Figure, ground, infrastructure.

Image accessed, April 21, 2022. (CCBY Jack H. Foisey) Figure 77 (right): Existing Program. Image accessed, April 21, 2022. (CCBY Jack H. Foisey)

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Site Plan

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New ground The three new structures sit next to existing commercial space, between the towers and park, and in/next to the parking garage (along with the computation center in the ground). Guiding the placement of these structures a series of site analysis diagrams: flutes running between the towers defining possible open space, drawing the grid into the site, and the existing site fences/ boundaries of program.

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The new ground also details an ownership model. As a collective, they receive a percentage of the profits from the use of the computing center. These profits are put towards improving, editing, and evaluating shared living facilities and infrastructure. The structures that push through are a modular heavy timber and copper scrim system that facilitates the expansion and contraction of the computation center and the exchanges of people, water, air, and information. Those who choose to live in this collective are opting into the maintenance that’s required to support this ownership model and the computation center. The spaces created by the center take over the existing parking garage, a node within the site, connecting the horizontal and vertical axis of the cooperative and the proposal.

The collective and computation center privilege collective living such as co-housing or communal housing taking advantage of the increased creation of information by the residence and the shared inputs and outputs of the computation center and residents. What this does is create new spatial possibilities and ownership that act on the room created the characteristics of an age, place, and value.

Figure 78 (above): Proposed Site Plan. Image accessed, April 21, 2022.

(CCBY Jack H. Foisey) Figure 79 (right): Proposed Program. Image accessed, April 21, 2022. (CCBY Jack H. Foisey)

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Typical Tower Floor Plan The living space is allocated in the center with a corridor running through.

The elevators are just below the geometric center of the building.

Color Ground Plan The living space is allocated in the center with a corridor running through.

The elevators are just below the geometric center of the building.

Ground Plan The living space is allocated in the center with a corridor running through.

The elevators are just below the geometric center of the building.

Ground

Underground Plan The living space is allocated in the center with a corridor running through.

The elevators are just below the geometric center of the building.

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Figure 80 (left): Proposed Floor Plans. Image accessed, April 22, 2022. (CCBY Jack H. Foisey) Figure 81 (above): Section Perspective Exploded Facade.

Image accessed, April 22, 2022.

(CCBY Jack H. Foisey)

Exploded New Structure

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Bureaucratic

Ownership Model

Exchanges

Figure 82 (top): Proposed Owernship Network. Image accessed, April 22, 2022.

(CCBY Jack H. Foisey) Figure 83 (above): Proposed Exchanges.

Image accessed, April 22, 2022. (CCBY Jack H. Foisey)

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Social

Material

Section Perspective

Computation Center Figure 84 (top): Section Perspective. Image accessed, April 22, 2022.

(CCBY Jack H. Foisey) Figure 85 (above): Top down perspective of Computation Center.

Image accessed, April 22, 2022. (CCBY Jack H. Foisey)

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Figure 86: New Structure 2.

Image accessed, April 22, 2022. (CCBY Jack H. Foisey)

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Figure 88: Top down cohousing unit perspective.

Image accessed, April 22, 2022. (CCBY Jack H. Foisey)

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Co-housing dinner time

105

A few notes Reflecting on the drawings/images made, models built, verbal presentation, and discussion the proposal was successful in it’s ambition to start a conversation around topics plaguing contemporary and late capitalistic life and in it’s ambition to represent and communicate in an effective and beautiful way however it failed to address place and clearly challenge neo-liberal housing markets. The focus of this spread is to be critical of the thesis rather than celebratory. Place was a question and critique brought up as the representation and positioning of the proposal did not engage place enough. In the introduction of the presentation three things were stated: an age, a place, and a value. The place however is multi-scalar and multi-temporal meaning that the place for the thesis was Manhattan, the lower east side, Seward Park Cooperative, and the history of experimental housing within architecture. This caused confusion about what was meant by place in that place here had a broader definition and that the thesis was not necessarily about an idea for a specific place but a larger model and architecture that generated a new context and could be applied to a specific place. A good example is the difference between a site and a place in architecture, the place was multi-scalar and multi-temporal while the site was a specific geographic and socio-economic-political location.

Another point of feedback to note came after the presentation in a conversation with one of the reviewers, they spoke about how envelope interacts with infrastructure in relation to adaptive reuse. Their critique with the proposal was unclarity in the specifics of long term growth and shrinkage of the computation center space, which, is a space that requires a highly engineered envelope. This comment brough up questions about how the envelop reflects more than just performance, like we’ve see in the past 10 years. The character and material of an envelope can become more architectural, more about the everyday life of a place, age, and value.

Figure 89: Section Axonometric. Image accessed, April 22, 2022.

(CCBY Jack H. Foisey)

106

Section Axonometric

107

Seward Park Community Center Seward Park High School

FedEx Drop Box The Pickle Guys Diller Friedman’s Pizza School NYC Kossar’s Bagels and Bialys Doughnut Plant

Ramiken VinVero Wines and Spirits Francois ghebaly Grand Cutter Barber Shop Loho Realty and Concierge Saluggi’s East Levitt Pharmacy Tribeca Pediatrics Citi Bank May May Kitchen Metro Acres Market USPS Post Office Clinton Variety Seward Park Housing

Seward Park

New York Public Library Seward Park

Figure 90: Discusive Map. Image accessed, April 22, 2022. (CCBY Jack H. Foisey)

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Parking Garage

CHAPTER 06

Critical Reflection Design as Research Methods Studio Theories + Frameworks Architecture and AI Intersticers of Storytelling

This chapter is a thesis program retrospective, a critical look back at the thesis exploration from first explorations to final presentation. This thesis exploration was difficult and feels as if it’s not over with many questions still left to answer and energy to explore them through architecture. There were many moments of clarity that came from other courses I was taking at the time such as Theories + Frameworks, Architecture and AI, and Interstices of Storytelling along with conversations with peers and professors.

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After the final thesis presentation and while writing this book, this thesis has shown me the importance of the topics explored and the importance of architecture, especially today. From time to time work done in the beginning of the thesis felt disconnected however the work always came back to make things more clear. If there were more time I would further develop the ownership model, take a deep dive into the realities of the infrastructure, explore place more thoroughly, and explore form in relation to infrastructure and change. I would also revise my methods by exploring physical mediums more and their interface with digital tools.

Other criteria to introduce could be the thesis engagement with a specific place further or a stepping back from a specific place and turning it fully into a model for other collective domestic spaces. The thesis’s criteria involving architectural form and poetics could be introduced to further push questions and solutions around form in relation to infrastructure and the body. Place was not explored enough, the clarity of infrastructure plug in was clear but could be better, it wasn’t entirely clear how I was engaging neo-liberal housing markets.

Some of the questions seem to circle around larger late-capitalistic practices, the characteristics of an age, place, and value, and architectures role.

All of the points raised were valid however I may challenge the critique about place. This may come from inexperience but I felt place was addressed at a large scale which may make it not about place and more about a context.

The conclusions that can be drawn from the thesis statement are that domestic space, while it is being addressed, is not engaging the requirements and restraints of todays age and value. This is in direct conversation with modernism’s journey through capitalism to late capitalism and the sharing economy. The conclusion drawn is that collectives, specifically ones heiring from modernist models, can be repositioned to favor exchange and the collectives long term shifting aspirations of a in a domestic setting.

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Figure 91: Site sketches.

Image accessed, April 22, 2022. (CCBY Jack H. Foisey)

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Figures Figure 01: Seeminly Random Statistics. Image accessed April, 21, 2022 Figure 02 (Top Right): Black Causus Dance. by Co-op City, 1970.

Image accessed April 17th, 2022.

Figure 03 (Direct Right): Array of surfaces from Manhattan, New York. Accessed April 9th, 2022. (CCBY Jack H. Foisey) Figure 04 (Top Right): Co-op Peace Committee. by Co-op City, 1970. Image accessed April 17th, 2022.

Figure 05: Ohio, Indiana, Michigan lines. by William Edwards Peters, 1918. Image accessed November 05th 2021 via Ohio Lands and Their Subdivision by William Edwards Peters, Harvard University pp.169.

Figure 06: Gridded land subdivision meets a river and existing township. Map of land subdivisions between Wood and Lucas counties, Ohio by William Edwards Peters, 1918.

Figure 07 (Top): Rendering the invisible visible of American industry. Motion Efficiency Study photograph taken by Frank and Lillian Gilbreth 1920’s.

Figure 08 (above): Foreman using Drill Press. Motion Efficiency Study photograph of a foreman using a drill press taken by Frank and Lillian Gilbreth, 1915.

Figure 09: Duplications and units of inheritance. Photograph of FRAC Nord-Pas de Calais by Lacaton and Vassal in Dunkerque, France.

Figure 10: Extruding what used to be. Photograph of Caixaforum Madrid by Herzog de Meuron in Madrid, Spain. Accessed November 11, 2021.

Figure 11: Sticky Note Sketch by Carol Burns, 2021. Accessed December 2, 2021. (CCBY Jack H. Foisey) Figure 12(top): Jasper Johns, Two Maps, 1965. Encaustic and collage on canvas (two panels), 90 1/8 × 70 1/4 in. (228.9 × 178.4 cm) Figure 13 (far right): Elements, Exploded axon of global studio proposal. Image accessed, April 21st, 22. (CCBY Jack H. Foisey) Figure 14 (right): Site relation, Top down axon of Manhattan.

Image accessed, April 21st, 22. (CCBY Jack H. Foisey) Figure 15: Ohio land subdivision maps documenting various locations and their division, Ohio by William Edwards Peters.

Figure 16 (top): Building Anatomy. Elevation, plan, and section alligned. Elevation photo by JSA in Ringkobing-Skjern, Denmark, 2015. Image accessed, April, 23rd, 2022

Figure 17 (top): Aerail Restoration. An aerial view of the Skjern River in 1960 and in 2020. Image accessed, April, 23th, 2022 Figure 18 (above): Ground and Architecture. Image accessed, April, 23rd, 2022 Figure 19 (top): Strips. Rendered view of a Parc de la Villette by OMA, 1982. Image accessed, January, 20th, 2022 Figure 20 (right): Strip sketch. Image accessed, April 21st, 2022 Figure 21 (top): Doubled Architecture. A ground perspective view facing the front of the FRAC by Lacaton and Vassal in Dunkerque, France, 2015 Figure 22 (right): More Architecture. Image accessed, April 21st, 2022 Figure 22 (top): Bole Rwanda. A ground perspective view facing the front of the aparment building by AD-WO in Addis, Ababa, Ethiopia, 2019.

Figure 23 (top): Bole Rwanda. A ground perspective view facing the front of the aparment building by AD-WO in Addis, Ababa, Ethiopia, 2019.

Figure 24 (right): Four Elements Sketch. Image accessed, April 20th, 2022.

Figure 25 (right): Characters. Image accessed, April 21, 2022.

(CCBY Jack H. Foisey) Figure 26 (above): Characters 2. Image accessed, December 8, 2021. (CCBY Jack H. Foisey) Figure 27: Catalog of Information. Image accessed, April 21th, 2022. (CCBY Jack H. Foisey) Figure 28: Exploded Domestic Space and Catalog. Image accessed, April 21th, 2022. (CCBY Jack H. Foisey) Figure 29: Helsinki, Garden City, Paris. Image accessed, April 21, 2022. (CCBY Jack H. Foisey) Figure 30: Scenario 01. Image accessed, April 21, 2022. (CCBY Jack H. Foisey) Figure 31: Cast, bond, object (surface, volume, material). Image accessed, December 8, 2021. (CCBY Jack H. Foisey) Figure 32: The Domestic Interior. Image accessed, April 21, 2022.

(CCBY Jack H. Foisey) Figure 33: Site node sketch. Image accessed, April 21, 2022.

(CCBY Jack H. Foisey) Figures 34-37: Manhattan in a few formats. Images accessed, April 21, 2022. (CCBY Jack H. Foisey)

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Figure 38 (top right): Discursive Seward Park. Image accessed, April 22, 2022. (CCBY Jack H. Foisey)

Figure 59 (above): Infrastructure Sketch. Image accessed, April 21, 2022.

Figure 39 (above): Seward Park: Slum Clearance. Booklet detailing proposal Image accessed, April 21, 2022. (CCBY Jack H. Foisey)

Figure 60 (top): Perspective Section Exploded Facade. Image accessed, April 21, 2022. (CCBY Jack H. Foisey)

Figures 40-42: Signal Attenuation at 3 scales. Image accessed, April 21, 2022. (CCBY Jack H. Foisey) Figure 43 (top): Node Sketch. Image accessed, April 21, 2022.

(CCBY Jack H. Foisey) Figure 44 (right): Strategies. Image accessed, April 21, 2022.

(CCBY Jack H. Foisey) Figure 45 (far right): Array of tests ad sketches. Image accessed, April 21, 2022. (CCBY Jack H. Foisey) Figure 46 (top): Infill Diagram. Image accessed, April 21, 2022.

(CCBY Jack H. Foisey) Figure 47 (right): Attenuation Plans. Image accessed, April 21, 2022. (CCBY Jack H. Foisey) Figure 48 (far right): Existing floor and unit plans. Image accessed, April 21, 2022. (CCBY Jack H. Foisey) Figure 49 (far right): Infill Test 05. Image accessed, April 21, 2022.

(CCBY Jack H. Foisey) Figure 50 (far right): Infill Test 02. Image accessed, April 21, 2022.

(CCBY Jack H. Foisey) Figure 51 (top): Wrap Diagram. Image accessed, April 21, 2022.

(CCBY Jack H. Foisey) Figure 52 (right): Wrap Test. Image accessed, April 21, 2022.

(CCBY Jack H. Foisey) Figure 53 (far top right): Infill Perspective. Image accessed, April 21, 2022. (CCBY Jack H. Foisey) Figure 54 (far right): Wrap Elements. Image accessed, April 21, 2022. (CCBY Jack H. Foisey) Figure 55: Infill Section. Image accessed, April 21, 2022. (CCBY Jack H. Foisey) Figure 56 (top): Ground Diagram. Image accessed, April 21, 2022. (CCBY Jack H. Foisey) Figure 57: Ground Section Axon. Image accessed, April 21, 2022.

(CCBY Jack H. Foisey) Figure 58: Ground Tests. Image accessed, April 21, 2022. (CCBY Jack H. Foisey)

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Figure 61 (right): Folding Facade. Image accessed, April 21, 2022.

(CCBY Jack H. Foisey) Figure 62 (top): Ownership model. Image accessed, April 21, 2022. (CCBY Jack H. Foisey) Figure 63 (above): Figure, ground, infrastructure. Image accessed, April 21, 2022. (CCBY Jack H. Foisey) Figure 64 (far right): Section Perspective. Image accessed, April 21, 2022. (CCBY Jack H. Foisey) Figure 65: Analytique. Image accessed, April 21, 2022. (CCBY Jack H. Foisey) Figures 66: Signals. Image accessed, April 21, 2022. (CCBY Jack H. Foisey) Figures 67: Seward Park Tower. Image accessed, April 21, 2022.

(CCBY Jack H. Foisey) Figures 68: Garage Section. Image accessed, April 21, 2022.

(CCBY Jack H. Foisey) Figures 69: New structure plan. Image accessed, April 21, 2022.

(CCBY Jack H. Foisey) Figure 70: Ground Diagram. Image accessed, April 21, 2022.

(CCBY Jack H. Foisey) Figure 71 (top): Section Model 01. Image accessed, April 21, 2022. (CCBY Jack H. Foisey) Figure 72 (left): Section Model Aerial. Image accessed, April 21, 2022. (CCBY Jack H. Foisey) Figure 73 (above): Existing site plan. Image accessed, April 21, 2022. (CCBY Jack H. Foisey) Figure 74 (right): Site paths. Image accessed, April 21, 2022.

(CCBY Jack H. Foisey) Figure 75 (far right): Grand Street. Image accessed, April 21, 2022. (CCBY Jack H. Foisey) Figure 76 (above): Figure, ground, infrastructure. Image accessed, April 21, 2022. (CCBY Jack H. Foisey) Figure 77 (right): Existing Program. Image accessed, April 21, 2022. (CCBY Jack H. Foisey) Figure 78 (above): Proposed Site Plan. Image accessed, April 21, 2022. (CCBY Jack H. Foisey)

Figure 79 (right): Proposed Program. Image accessed, April 21, 2022. (CCBY Jack H. Foisey) Figure 80 (left): Proposed Floor Plans. Image accessed, April 22, 2022. (CCBY Jack H. Foisey) Figure 81 (above): Section Perspective Exploded Facade. Image accessed, April 22, 2022. (CCBY Jack H. Foisey) Figure 82 (top): Proposed Owernship Network. Image accessed, April 22, 2022. (CCBY Jack H. Foisey) Figure 83 (above): Proposed Exchanges. Image accessed, April 22, 2022. (CCBY Jack H. Foisey) Figure 84 (top): Section Perspective. Image accessed, April 22, 2022. (CCBY Jack H. Foisey) Figure 85 (above): Top down perspective of Computation Center. Image accessed, April 22, 2022. (CCBY Jack H. Foisey) Figure 86: New Structure 2. Image accessed, April 22, 2022.

(CCBY Jack H. Foisey) Figure 87: Presentation board 3 Close up. Image accessed, April 22, 2022. (CCBY Jack H. Foisey) Figure 88: Top down co-housing unit perspective. Image accessed, April 22, 2022. (CCBY Jack H. Foisey) Figure 89: Section Axonometric. Image accessed, April 22, 2022.

(CCBY Jack H. Foisey) Figure 90: Discusive Map. Image accessed, April 22, 2022.

(CCBY Jack H. Foisey) Figure 91: Site sketches. Image accessed, April 22, 2022. (CCBY Jack H. Foisey)

115

End Notes Chapter 01

Chapter 02

1

1

Late Capitalism can be described as the end of capitalism

sparked by industry and solidified by the information age. It can also be characterized by the sharing economy where value and competition are exhausted to the point of failure creating space for a new model. The term was first used by the economist Werner Sombart in Der Moderne Kapitalismus published between 1902 - 1927 to describe a stage of capitalism.

2

Mark Jarzombek, Digital Stockholm Syndrome in the Post

Ontological Age (University of Minnesota Press, 2014), X 2

Objects that produce data could be computers, smart

thermostats, smart homes, and smart watches 3

Mark Jarzombek, X. While Jarzombek prefers the term Ontic

Exhaust, experts prefer the term digital exhaust referring to Le Corbusier and the Architectural Promenade, by Flora

Samuel published in 2010, describes the idea that Le Corbusier (a symbol of modernism) designed with the idea that the body

excess data.

4

James, C. Scott. Seeing Like A State: How Certain Schemes

should move through a building in a specific sequence. The

to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, Yale

architectural promenade became something much larger.

University Press, 1998), 02. Sedentarization is not the focus of

The promenade, during the rise of modernism, became a

James C. Scotts Seeing Like A State however it is stated as the

solidified form of urban planning, architecture, and capitalism.

initial question leading to main content of the book.

The movement of goods and people between the city and hinterlands created systems of exchange and boundaries of

5

An example of a political outline is a citizen. As defined by

definition ossifing the metropolis and the hinterland. Resources

Merriam Webster’s Eleventh Edition is “a person who legally

became the currency of exhcange such as: peoples time and

belongs to a country and has rights and protection of that

labor, physical material, gas, water, and fuel. The promenade

country.” The data in the case of the citizen are their rights

played a large role in the development of capitalism reaffirming

because rights are alternative representations of the person.

industrial scale production and the automobile.

3

Lilian Wald our history. (https://www.henrystreet.org/about/

our-history/lillian-wald/#:~:text=Born%20into%20a%20life%20 of,she%20founded%20Henry%20Street%20Settlement). Lilian

6

The essay referenced is from the second edition of Site

Matters published in 2021.

7

Harvey M, Jacobs, Claiming the Site: Ever Evolving Social-

Wald played a large role in the development of Settlement

Legal Conceptions of Ownership and Property (New York,

Houses in Manhattan along with the NAACP, United States

Routledge, 2021), 15, 17. What Jacobs means when he connects

Children’s Bureau, the National Child Labor Committee, and the

the airport to changing conceptions of land ownership is that

National Women’s Trade Union League.

the airport is an international territory. This means that the

4

space of an airport requires special laws and zoning.

Jeffrey Scheuer, University Settlement of New York City.

https://socialwelfare.library.vcu.edu/settlement-houses/

8

Instagram’s data policy page on their Help Center website

university-settlement-of-new-york-city/). (directly from text)

directly states the use of data: “to personalize features

“NOTE: This history of University Settlement is taken from

and context and to make suggestion for you on and off our

‘Legacy of Light: University Settlement’s First Hundred Years,”

products.” (help.instagram.com/519522125107875/?helpref=uf_

a 32-page pamphlet written by Jeffrey Scheuer, 1985. The

share). The reason Instagram is a good example is because

photographs and news clips were provided by Amanda Peck,

of their large user base and they were recently acquired by

Assistant Director for External Affairs and Donor Relations for

Facebook.

University Settlement and its subsidiary organization: The Door.”

9

Siegfried Giedion, Mechanization Takes Command (New York,

Oxford University Press, 1948), 6.

116

10 11 12

Siegfried Giedion, Mechanization Takes Command, 101.

23

Anne Lacaton, Jean-Philippe Vassal, Freedom of Use (Guest

Lecturer, Harvard Graduate School of Design, March 25 2015), Giedion, Mechanization Takes Command, 100 As seen in figure 02 the form of the metal line allowed the

human and space to be controlled. To break it down further the white grid in the background helped assign coordinates to the metal line. This was then put through a series of equations and

00:31:46 – 00:31:24.

24

Jean Baudrillard, Simulations (Columbia University,

Semiotext[e], 1983), 12.

25

Lacaton and Vassal have many other projects that do this

design iterations to make the task the creates the metal line as

same thing such as 530 logements Grand Parc, Maison Latapie,

efficient as possible.

and Les Grands ensembles de logements.

13

26

Max Kuo, Advance of the Digital Frenemy (Anyone

Corporation, 2021), 100.

14 15 16

phases chronologically overlap revealing a strong connection Kuo, Advance of the Digital Frenemy, 99-100, 111.

between the two projects. Why the Caixaforum is discussed more here is because it came before the Elbphilharmonie.

Kuo, Advance of the Digital Frenemy, 111.

As described earlier in this text sedentarization is a method

used by the state to make people citizens.

17

These two building not only have architectural and

representational overlap, but the conceptual and project

27

Herzog De Meuron, 201 Caixaforum Madrid: Text. See

the buildings description on their website: https://www. herzogdemeuron.com/index/projects/complete-works/201225/201-caixaforum-madrid.html

Arjun Appadurai, Modernity At Large: Cultural Dimensions of

Globalization (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press,

28

Meuron, 201 Caixaforum Madrid: Text. The building used to be

1996) 03.

a power plant. What remains is a shell of the brick façade.

18

29

Arjun Appadurai, Modernity At Large: Cultural Dimensions of

Globalization, 32-35.

19

Appadurai, Modernity At Large: Cultural Dimensions of

30

Giedion, Mechanization Takes Command, 06, 99-103 Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of

Globalization, 35-36.

Globalization, 35.

20

Appadurai, Modernity At Large: Cultural Dimensions of

Globalization, 35-36. While Appadurai doesn’t directly attribute mediascapes to domestic spaces he heavily discusses state created media. The state created media is completely out of control of the citizen attributing control to the domestic space.

21

The term less is more was first printed in 1855 by Robert

Browning in a Poem titled Andrea del Sarto and was then popularized by Mies van der Rohe in the early to mid-20th century.

22

Anne Lacaton, Jean-Philippe Vassal, FRAC Nord-Pas de

Calais (https://www.lacatonvassal.com/index.php?idp=61, 2021), text description in English.

117

Jack H. Foisey Wentworth Institute of Technology Masters of Architecture 2021