Haptic Site Analysis

HAPTIC: relating to or based on the sense of touch To Capture a Site

Winter| 2014 Mandia Gonzales Eddie Montejo Anthony Thompson

As we wander through the city we're immersed in three dimensional textures -- as we move, our feet scrape on the concrete beneath our feet sending vibrations throughout our bodies, our hands grasp cold steel door handles, and we brace ourselves as a constant fleet of engines barrage our eardrums. And despite the richness of our experiences as we travel through the urban environment our brains instinctively filter until we're lost in ourselves and not in the space.

How do we capture the feeling of the grain of historic clay bricks, or the edges of a carved wooden door, the softness of polished brass? These textures inform and signify specific places, times, and histories that are often overlooked. We must explore the perception of patterns on the skins' surface, denoting edges, curvature, and texture.

In this project, we explored the haptic realm of our project site. This allowed us to capture impressions of this tactile sense for our own personal experience and understanding. By exploring texture as a proxy for environmental variation, we were able to gather insight into the torn urban fabric of Goose Hollow and Downtown.

Haptic perception is active exploration.

ON SITE natural -- man made douglas fir, organic, stone buried history

WEST brick rugose facade, horizontal , strata, brick mortar, pioneer

EAST integrated, cast decorate, ornate, floral jagged polygon

This is an exploration of a city block and its adjacent quarters in the Goose Hollow neighborhood, NW Portland, OR. The site is bordered to the north by SW Morrison St., to the south by SW Yamhill St., and bounded to the east and west by SW 13th and 14th Avenues.

Standing directly between Pioneer Square and Jeld-Wen Field, one might expect the site to be a comfortable and inviting urban space, reflective of downtown Portland’s vibrancy and activity.

Instead, the urban fabric stretching from the Willamette to the West Hills is torn in two by I-405. The freeway is sunken meters below the street level, completely exposed; the conversions of SW Morrison and SW Yamhill to bridges stand as the only preservations of the historic Goose Hollow grid. This tear in Goose Hollow’s urban fabric creates a physical canyon, through which the sound and smell of vehicles on the freeway overwhelm the possibility for street life, commerce, and Portland culture. The lasting impressions from these excavated blocks are of distinct separation between Downtown Portland and Goose Hollow.

These challenges present a unique opportunity. Despite the retrospective tragedy of the lost blocks in the neighborhood core, the open space above the freeway has the potential to undergo metamorphosis similar to the parking-lot-to-Pioneer-Square story. As the intensification of development continues in Goose Hollow, open space will remain at a premium. Capping the blocks over the freeway will mend the tears in the Goose Hollow’s urban fabric, and will bear new public spaces, mitigate the externalities of fumes and noise, and reclaim scarce urban land from automobiles for human-scale activity. As the geographic axis between Pioneer Square and Jeld-Wen Field, this site has the potential to become Goose Hollow’s new public and commercial nexus.