Design as Research 02 Chapter 04

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

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.

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)

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 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 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)

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)

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.

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)

Infill

Wrap

Density

Ground

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)

Typical Floor Plan

Unit Types

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)

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)

Perspective

Wrap Elements

Copper Screen Wooden Louvers Wrap Structure Sliding Panels Verticle Circulation

Figure 55: Infill Section. Image accessed, April 21, 2022. (CCBY Jack H. Foisey)

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)

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)

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

Information Flow

Server Rack

Raised Floor

Information, Air Flow Interior Wall

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)

Structure Inputs/Outputs Copper Mesh

01

04

01 02 03 05

01 04

02 03 05 06

01

01 01

01

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.

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)

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. Signal Attenuation

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)

Geometry Glitch

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

Region Iridescent Map Render

Brute force noise

Pixelation

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

wood texture brick texture 60% | 925c5b b4b6a5 6496ad d5b153