2012 urbanisms by jonathan.scelsa

URBANISMS | 08.10_05.11 |

PORTFOLIO OF WORK

Jonathan A. Scelsa

|JONATHAN A. SCELSA|

ma_114R Beacon St #2, Somerville, MA 02143

tel_914.589.1298

email_jonathan.scelsa@gmail.com

URBANISMS | 08.10_05.11 |

PORTFOLIO OF WORK

Jonathan A. Scelsa

| DEFINING URBANISM |

Author Jonathan A. Scelsa

Cover and Book Design Jonathan A. Scelsa

Printed in the U.S.A. by www.lulu.com ÂŠ 2011 Jonathan A. Scelsa All rights reserved. No part may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means without express written consent from the author. The work herein is represents both individual and group work at Carnegie Mellon University and after. All reasonable efforst to secure permission of rthe visual material produced herin have been made by the authors. They wish to apologize to anyone who has not been reached. The author would like to thank Steve Lee, Scott Smith, Elizabeth MacWillie, Jeremy Forsythe, Ashok Kanangsundrum, Kevin Wei, Hester Lyons, and Jay Lonschein, in addition to Joseph Scelsa and Joyce Tisi.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

OBJECT URBANISMS, An Essay on Object World

FORESTATION URBANISM, A New Campus for Paris Sud at Saclay

BRONX INTERMODALITY, New Hub Creation

RED HOOK RIBBON, Brooklyn Bike Masterplanning

ALLEGHENY STITCH FARMS, Urban Infill Agriculture

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OBJECT URBANISMS

AN ESSAY ON WORLD MAKING WITH OBJECTS

Publication: Interpunct Carnegie Mellon University

The “Quasi-Object” has been manifest across several formal

Team Members Jonathan A. Scelsa

blending and mating of formal types to create projects that both

Publish Date: May 2011

aesthetics within the past ten years of practice, and engages in the resonate in the immediacy of the locality within which they are built but in simultaneity participate in world urbanization beyond the scale of the city. The “quasi-object” poses a dialectic; a “both-and” urban condition that seeks to simultaneously argue for site-less a-priori architecture while being extremely formally sensitive to its context. The ‘quasi-object’ is described at another scale by Michel Serres to be the token, the object that is both here and everywhere. The city itself is a fascination of Serres, how it is an object that internalizes the citizen and deprives them of the world, ‘To think the city, one must leave it and see it as a part of the world.’ In his essay on Serres, Marcel Henaff questions whether we can think of new scales of the city or a continuous city world, in which we merge the ideas of city and world together. Serres uses the idea of Rome to examine the quasi-object, because as both a center and ordering part of our society it was reliant first on its physical presence and then on its dissipated presence in the world. Rome as a quasi-

object exhibited the simultaneity of scales both worldly and city object. I question can architecture hold a similar scalar relationship. The reading of these projects mandate an understanding of an urban object as an investment on a form of verticality, one that marks the position of the project and imbues enough of a distance reading that gives a gestalt via an optical absorption of its totality. The skyscraper has been already emphasized as an internalized object world in Rem Koolhaas retroactive reading of Manhattan, where facilitated by the gridiron, these heterogenous vertical objects express their own individual private worlds set up on public plinths. This affect ordered differentiation is underscored in Madilon Vrisendorp’s renderings of the City of the Captive Globe. Thus in Manhattan we can extrapolate that there is a collapse of scales worlds, from the true world to the discrete geography of Manhattan to the world object of the skyscraper. Opposed to this, the quasiobject does not seek the same discreteness of object as illustrated under the Delirious New York Rhetoric, rather the Quasi-Object seeks an ambiguity both a discreteness of form and a blend or dithering into its context, one example of this might be in the blending into the condition of the vertical into the horizontal city ground. It is in this ambiguity where scales the understood scales of the world collapse into each other and thus we are neither in the city object nor the condition of the world. It is in this way that it the quasi-object is the object that is larger than itself, the object that is also the city; or the city that is also the world. In many ways the quasi-object has its routes in architecture as illustrated by Kenneth Frampton in his 1999 publication, Megaform as Urban Landscape. Frampton describes the methodology of designing large projects to meet and inflect the ground plane, taking on premises of horizontality and landscape. These large horizontal urban projects qualify themselves through embedment into the urban design of the city, these projects invariably lose their reading as object, in their horizontal size and lack inability to capture their end. Since his departure from PLOT, Bjarke Ingels in his solo practice has developed several projects that fit under this cannon of worldly ‘quasi-objects.’ We can see the Scala Tower proposal as a stern critique of the Manhattanist zoned object, both in its embrace and rejection of its own plinth. In essence, Scala is a vertical object 05

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that has been complicated by an interest of meeting the horizontal various referential horizontal data, the plinth and the ground. As a result the object becomes the city and the city falls into the object; it is the constant activation by the movement and people of the city that alter it over time. Further, in its detailing Scala, like many of BIG’s projects including the design for the Tek building in Taiwan, seeks an obfuscation of scale via the use of ribbon windows that are less than the floor to floor. This scalar device emphasizes not the understanding of the building in relationship to the proportions of the human and the context but rather underscore it as an object when vertical and topographic when approaching the horizontal. As a whole these measures present the dialectic of the Megaform and the object both present and at any given time the viewer needs to choose to push one reading before the other and thus the building bends into the city and the world discretely. Unlike the Megaform, which Frampton describes as reinvigorating architecture with the concept of the marking of ground, the ‘Quasi-Object’ also has measurable explorations in the tectonics of material and ornamental construction of the site to dissolve the object. Herzog + De Meuron, have engaged in several projects where the form alone resonates the project first as the object, followed by the deformation of the landscape to absorb the object blurring the edges of its boundaries. In the two stadia: Beijing Olympics and Allianz Airline Arena in Munich, the architects have taken the stadium typology for its object status and examined possibilities for blurring the condition into the ground via the inscription of the formal operators on the ground. In Beijing the graphic of the lace pattern which, similar to the Big project evokes an affect of scalelessness is then printed into the landscape as a series of paths leading to the object. Similarly Allianz employs the strategy of bringing the pattern formal ETFE pattern into the landscape using it as a path network but here we see the programming of the landform to the parking below creating a complex and ambiguous condition of the finitude of the volume of the object in its constructed landscape. The Herzog + De Meuron Stadium’s demonstrate the emphasis on the projects free-standing resolute discreteness while also creating its ability to morph into the greater condition of the landscape, blurring the zone of entry and questioning the limits to the form of the object. 06

Evoking the inquiries of the Generic City these projects seek to eradicate the specificity of the local by formally rendering themselves neutral of the evidences of immediate vernaculars, by taking on the de-familiarizing properties of the scale-less and product design and in many cases internalize the exterior world behind a blank facade of the object. Simultaneously, these projects have embraced landscape and urban design strategies to dither and blur the building into their surroundings. These projects inquire whether these are tendencies towards Sassenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s global city or perhaps a declaration that architecture can participate in considerations of envisioning urbanism beyond the scale of the region; the ecumenopolis.

Works Cited HĂŠnaff, Marcel; Of Stones, Angels and Humans: Michel Serres and the Global City. Vol. 26, No. 2, Issue 83: An Ecology of Knowledge: Michel Serres: A Special Issue (1997), pp. 59-80 Frampton, Kenneth. Megaform as Urban Landscape. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan, A. Alfred Taubman College of Architecture Urban Planning, 1999. Print. Koolhaas, Rem. Delirious New York: a Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan. New York: Oxford UP, 1978. Print.

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FORESTATION URBANISM

A NEW CAMPUS FOR PARIS ORSAY AT SACLAY

Academy: Harvard University GSD Studio Option

Beyond Paris [suite] is the second studio focused on the develop-

Professor Andrea P. Leers

The subject of this studio is the design of a new science campus for

Team Members Jonathan A. Scelsa Ilana Cohen

the city. It builds on the research of a prior studio for a new social sci-

Project Type: Regional and Campus Planning Project Date: Spring 2010

ment of Paris beyond its historic perimeter and into the periphery. the University of Paris Orsay at Saclay, on the southwest outskirts of ences campus at Aubervilliers. The future development of the Paris metropolitan region beyond the present political and physical boundary of the city continues to be a national priority, and in 2009 President Sarkozy solicited research and proposals from ten international teams of architects and urbanists. Jean Nouvel, Richard Rogers, and MVRDV were among those whose teams conducted broad based studies and proposed visions for a more integrated urban area. Among the priorities for the growth of the metropolitan area is the expansion of the university system to achieve international competitiveness known as “Opération Campus.” Building on analyses of the region and morphologies of campus and open space the studio, looks at the proposal for a new science campus on the Saclay plateau to the southwest of the city. The studio crossed disciplines to generate a landscape, infrastructure, and urban design framework for the campus and its district, as well as the archi-

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tectural development of a principal building. Located approximately 20km (35 minutes by RER commuter rail) from the center of Paris, the Saclay plateau is a large territory of 7700 hectares (30 square miles) with some 27 communes or towns, 320,000 inhabitants and significant agricultural production. It is a raised belvedere, with broad visual perspectives, and subjected to high winds. Its edges have more protected wooded slopes. Before the end of the 17th century, the plateau was a vast swampy area,

Opposite: Plateau exploded topography, showcasing the impressive ridgeline. Above: Saclay Plateau relationship to the Parisian mobility infrastructural system. Previous: Paris Sud Campus Urban Forest Plaza.

and when Louis XIV occupied the Chateau of Versailles in 1670, his engineer Thomas Gobert constructed a series of hydraulic systems to bring water to the fountains and parks designed by Le Nôtre. The result was a system of channels, viaducts, water towers, and reservoirs, many of which exist today, which drained the swamps and created a rich agricultural area. The steep slopes of the plateau shaped development with towns and rail lines in the low perimeter around the plateau. In the 1950’s the plateau itself began to be developed first for defense related industries, and later technical universities and research enterprises and institutes. 11

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SMALL

MEDIUM

LARGE

X-LARGE

Above: Tessellated forestry cells acompanied by Urbanism. Right: isometric diagrams showing the layers of the variation forest cells, buffer zone and urban envelope density.

Paris sits on the cusp of one of the largest forest networks in the european continent. As the city begins to encorach outwards beyond the periphireque and the super-periph, the extensions of urbanism are beginning to challenege many of the rural and historic landscapes of the peri-urban condition. The first wave of this beyond paris growth is centered in the extension of the University network the surrounding areas. The studio’s task was to work with the Parisian authorities to relocate the University of Paris XI, Saclay at Orsay, from the bottom of the yvette river valley, to the top of the Saclay Plateau, encouraging the plateau’s stance as a new research and science hub. The plateau which already has become known for its atomic research and notable Ecole des Polytechnique, has succumb to a trend of urbanistic aggregations of large autonomous pieces without a vision for the plateau. The decision was made that while one new entity couldn’t bind together and thicken the urban quality of the entire plateau, a non synthetic use perhaps could. Today the plateau is home to the largest agglomeration of science and technology education, research, and hi-tech industries in the region. Because these entities are widely scattered across the plateau,

FOREST CELLS

BUFFER ZONE

URBAN ENVELOPE

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Overleaf: Rather a pro-active manifesto for American Urbanism of the twentieth. Above: Campus center model, with library facing the center campus forestry cell. Right: Campus plan, the campus occupies 21 cells of the grid with 5 more devoted to faculty housing.

the intention of the future development is to create a dense cluster of facilities together with a community to support them at the southern end of the plateau. The University of Paris Orsay, now located below the plateau, will be relocated as the centerpiece of the new cluster. Some large university and independent research institutes have already been built on the plateau, functioning as isolated islands of activity without integrated planning. With the implantation of a major new campus and proposed related private high-tech development, the intention is to create a coherent ensemble including the existing recent structures. It is hoped that the kind of synergy that exists in the MIT/Kendall Square area, and rail) from the center of Paris, the Saclay plateau is a large territory of 7700 hectares (30 square miles) with some 27 communes or towns, 320,000 inhabitants and significant agricultural production. It is a raised belvedere, with broad visual perspectives, and subjected to high winds. Its edges have more protected wooded slopes. Before the end of the 17th century, the plateau was a vast swampy area, and when Louis XIV occupied the Chateau of Versailles in 1670, his engineer Thomas Gobert constructed a series of hydraulic systems to bring water to the fountains and parks designed by Le N么tre. The result was a system of channels, viaducts, water towers, and reservoirs, many of which exist today, which drained the swamps and created a rich agricultural area. The steep slopes of the plateau shaped development

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with towns and rail lines in the low perimeter around the plateau. In the 1950â&#x20AC;&#x2122;s the plateau itself began to be developed first for defense related industries, and later technical universities and research enterprises and institutes. The research became focused on attentuating the proposed urbanism on the plateau with a strategic toolkit of re-forestation. The forest

Above: Panoramic perspective down the main corridors of campus. Left: Plaza typologies and their accompanying speciation. Overleaf: Perspective of Library from main campus lawn.

toolkit made up of buffer zones, stitch forests, cultivation plantations, and alley vectors, would become a way to both densify the existing as well as continue the history of cultivation on the plateau. The new cultivation however, rather than being relegated to wheat fields is now articulated in agro-forestry, a dual layer cultivation methodology that utilizes both the canopy and the understory simultaneously. This new trend of agroforesty is one that is being research in the greater france and could be very applicable to the urban context through various sizes of development. Further in areas that are not ready for development the forestation can take on the scale of silva-culture popular land banking; forests intended for urbanism that are currently being used to grow sustainable deposits of wood. Beyond its productive gains, the use of forestry creates a layer of fill and density which is desirable as the city moves beyond the periph21

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ery into its region. Though not having the density of program available to re-create the urban synthetic density achived in the heart of the Paris Periphe, the forestation would allow for a similar layer of physical built F.A.R. while facillitated a unique natural quality of the other that is the Paris Peri-Urban Condition. In order to develop a method for instantiating both new development and new forestry across the agricultural plateau, a cell structure was developed that would allow for various sizes of forestry and urban density with a direct proportionality: The smaller the forestry cell the larger the synthetic density. This was then inscribed across the plateau in a method to allow for more of an orginal agricultural preserved center, with a more dense ring edge of urbanism. Determined by a base grid of 50m x 50m which was articularted based on the ratios extrapolated from several park spaces in the center of paris, such as the plac de voge, the grid allowed for both center of campus as well as optimum planting beds for new agroforesty systems. This ring of urbanism would be accompanied by a new plateau wide transit system that would allow for the depositing of Parisians into urban fabric around the plateau periphery as opposed to the edge of forest and empty agricultural land as exists today. Within the campus, the cells break down to a middle scale of density that informs a public quad for similar types of research program. The University for Saclay at Orsay, which is a chemistry and bio-chem program is typically arranged in clusters for which the strategy is very suited for. This nicely, created an interior farming approach as well as an exterior front mall landscape that is usable for the campus movement; intimate spaces and public spaces. One of the forestry cells as an anomaly is left fully planted to accentuate the interplay between tree stand and buildling and that they work in tandem. This space becomes the life of the campus and a main point for public activity. Opposite to this space is the library, which has an extra large interior court of public program but also is the largest and central building for campus, acting as the proverbial wind stand and marker of the intellectual crop of the plateau. The low part of the library acts as a signpost, quite literally as the university name is emblazoned in the channell glass facade. This signpost acts as a waypoint for all the public and private spaces of the campus. Within this block are the public reading rooms, the audio visual areas as well as small classrooms and theatres that support the surrounding

Left: Sectional Library model, depicting the reading rooms in white and the lower public space plinth of program. Overleaf: The upper floors are dedicated to the stack space which are in turn cooled from southern exposure by a green layer rainscreen.

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classrooms. In addition a public exterior eating environment is offered on two levels for the students. The library featuring a southern and a northern exposure facade is treated by a green wall shade and a reading room system respectively. The green wall is designed to bring to the facade the program from within where the speciation is representative of the lighting needs and considerations of the internal workings. In addition several void spaces are left in the facade for bamboo courtyards which bring

Above: Typical Library Floor Sectional Isometric. Left: Libary Courtyard perspective depicting the green wall protection from southern exposure. Overleaf: Horizontal exploded isometric showing the systems of the building individually.

light further into the depth of the slab type. Built off a double core, the extra circulation between stack levels allows for the long slab to be an effective way to move up and down between levels. The elevation reflects a gradient of more public private reading spaces below moving upwards to larger numbers of stack and dedicated research spaces. At its core, the project begins to ask whether forestry can actually be a method of urbanization that generates growth density and the same volumetric feeling of the city while maintaining a tie to the naturalness of the site.

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JONATHAN A. SCELSA

|JONATHAN A. SCELSA| ma_114R Beacon St #2, Somerville, MA 02143

tel_914.589.1298

email_jonathan.scelsa@gmail.com

URBANIMS