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Issue #: 5 by FunctionLab
Adaptation
asensio_mah
720 Issue 5 / Summer 2014 / The Function of Adaptation
The model of urbanization exemplified in Manhattan’s 1811 Commissioner’s grid resonates with a more general categorization of nineteenth century urban organizations that operate through a process of optimization and regulation. Typically associated with this category of urbanization is the synthesis of particular urban functions into replicable standards, producing a model for urbanization that enforces an assumed formal efficiency and archetype over the particularities of a territory.
“Adaptation and function are two aspects of one problem. “ Julian Huxley
asensio_mah
Manhattan’s urbanization could very well have taken a different approach, where a predecessor to the definitive 1811 plan, Mangin and Goerck’s 1801 plan for Manhattan suggests a different sensibility towards urbanization. A sensibility that appropriates and studies existing or given conditions as the framework for its definition. Rather than an engineered exercise in optimization based on ideal efficiencies, Manhattan’s urbanization may have evolved as a negotiation with and adaptation to the existing.
Project Team Leire Asensio Villoria David Syn Chee Mah Ken Chongsuwat Yingjia Gong Peichen Hao Yue Shi Yujun Yin
Through the analysis and reading of the site in its pre development state as recorded in the 1865 Viele map, the following series of speculative drawings and imagery riff off the hypothetical narrative of an alternative Manhattan that emerges and evolves out of triggers both embedded and latent within the site. Topography as well as hydrological processes offer some of the initiating patterns that reorient the simplicity of the cadastral and infrastructural grid into a highly differentiated framework for urban growth. The Commissioner’s grid’s relative neutrality and standardization offers a model for adaptability that benefits from redundancy as well as a rudimentary formalism that supports the easy replication and repurposing of city blocks. Our speculative adapted Manhattan, on the other hand, presents an intricate ecology that invites its colonizers to identify their respective niches within its elaborate network.
Sanitary and Topographic Map of the City and Island of Manhattan, 1865, Egbert Ludovicus Viele, New York
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The formation of an infrastructural network is developed by adapting and reorienting the vectors of movement to negotiate its swelling geomorphology and to cultivate the island’s surface hydrology. This reorients the development of the bundled infrastructural and cadastral grid from the actualization of a standard idealized functionality to the possibility of an organization that materializes from the function of adaptation. The resulting performance or functioning of this emergent organization as a plane for colonization no longer results from assumptions of linear relationships between form and its subsequent function but is a byproduct. It presents a conundrum in a number of parallel functional values that are often mistaken as mutually interdependent and interchangable. The speculative re-imagination of an adapted Manhattan invites a split between these often bundled understandings of function.
Adaptation
Manhattan Analysed A series of environmental conditions of the pre development Manhattan are studied and elaborated into a series of operative maps and diagrams. Topographic as well as hydrological processes are converted into a series of notation techniques that allow for the development of measured responses to Manhattan’s pre development conditions. Variations in topographic elevation, slope as well as surface water hydrology are utilizied as triggers for the strategic deployment and differentiation of a reimagined Manhattan urbanization model.
Manhattan Re-imagined By adopting an adaptive sensibility towards the deployment of urban systems, our re-imagined Manhattan simultaneously resonates with both vernacular settlement and computational practices. By locating environmental triggers that offer cues for laying out the city’s systems, certain adaptive functions are prioritized above standardization and replicability. The resulting urban field occupies a varied material quality in clear distinction to the comparative regularity of the Commisioner’s Plan. Its resonance with the Olmstead and Vaux’s Central Park hints not so much at a shared preference for the natural or “organic” but is invested in the function of adaptation often identified in the study of natural organizational processes and its capacity for offering a generative process that may yield differing functional economies and values.
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Manhattan Plan, asensio_mah, 2014 MANHATTAN In biological models of adaptation, the relationship between an organism and its environment triggers the unfolding and differentiation of its developmental process. In contrast to linear economies of efficiency and optimization, adaptation offers another value indicator for deliberating on function and its effect on form that assumes an evolutionary and feedback relationship between the organism and its environment. By adapting its public infrastructural network to the island’s watershed and runoff patterns, the metropolis re-purposes its circulation pattern into a conveyance and management mechanism for the island and citys’s hydrological processes. Block patterns emerge out of this highly differentiated ecosystem that aggergates and sprawls variably in response to the specifics of its existing setting. Urban development varies and works to locate its niche within the diversity of sizes, proportions, orientations and elevations of the emerging urban block pattern. The city’s open space organization is informed by the island’s hydrological patterns as well as its rolling topography. Its large open spaces are strategically chosen to correspond with the large hills that scatter the islands landscape. The city’s major open public spaces are distributed throughout the island, producing many public centers for the urban field rather than consolidating into a singular central location.
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Manhattan Axonometric, 2014 5
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Lower Manhattan, asensio_mah, 2014 6
Adaptation
Mid-Manhattan, asensio_mah, 2014 7
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Upper Manhattan, asensio_mah, 2014 8
Adaptation
Manhattan’s reimagined fabric, asensio_mah, 2014 9
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#5 / Summer 2014 / Adaptability Leire Asensio-Villoria is a registered architect in Spain and studied architecture at the ETSASS and the Architectural Association (AA). She received her diploma in architecture (with honors) from the AA. Leire is a practising architect as well as an educator. She is currently teaching at the Harvard Graduate School of Design in both the departments of architecture and landscape architecture, Asensio-Villoria has also taught in graduate design school at the AA from 2004 to 2007 and had been a Visiting Lecturer in Architecture at Cornell from 2006 to 2010. In 2002, Asensio-Villoria, together with David Mah, founded asensio_mah, a multi-disciplinary design collaborative active in the design and delivery of architecture, landscape design and master planning. Asensio_mah’s work has exhibited and published internationally. David Mah is a practising architect and educator. He has been a lecturer at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design since 2010. Previous to Harvard, he has taught at Cornell University’s departments of Architecture as well as City and Regional Planning from 2007 till 2010. David has also taught design studio within the postgraduate design, Landscape Urbanism program at the Architectural Association in London from 2004 till 2007.
Manhattan’s re-imagined blocks, asensio_mah, 2014
asensio_ mah Project TeamLeire Asensio Villoria David Syn Chee Mah
David has been collaborating with Leire Asensio Villoria as asensio_mah since 2002. asensio_mah is a multi-disciplinary design collaborative active in the design and delivery of architecture, landscape design and master planning. Asensio_mah’s work has exhibited and published internationally.
720 is the occasional pamphlet of FunctionLab, the think tank of Farshid Moussavi Architecture.
Ken Chongsuwat Yingjia Gong Peichen Hao Yue Shi Yujun Yin www.functionlab.org ©2013 All rights reserved. Published by FunctionLab 66 Warwick Square London SW1V 2AP Contact: functionlab@farshidmoussavi.com +44(0)20 7033 6490
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