Thesis Book by Megan Pritts

The Wedding of Jane Jacobs & Le Corbusier

Surgical joining of low-rise urban fabric and the tower-in-the-park

Megan Pritts Syracuse University School of Architecture F11-S12 Primary Advisor Randall Korman Secondary Advisor Elizabeth Kamell

Contents Urban Surgery

Site Analysis

Project References and Resources

Precedents

Project: The Wedding of the Village View & the East Village

Addendum: Ideas Found in Practice

108

Glossary

110

Bibliography

112

Romance Nineteenth Century Streetscape A History of Housing in the Lower East Side The Attack on the “Corridor Street” “The Skyscraper has been built above yesterday’s streets” The Death and Life of an Urban Block The Fight Tall or Short: That is the Question A Breathing Exercise How do building sections affect urban space? The Street’s Wall: It’s Reclamation Opposites Attract

Site: The East Village & the High-Rise Plan and Elevation Analysis East 5th Street Corridor Daily Sun Paths and Solar Angles The Site Condition: Past, Present, Future Program-Site Fit Diagrams

The Wedding of Jane Jacobs & Le Corbusier

Surgical joining of low-rise urban fabric and the tower-in-the-park

Condition One of the most romantic views of a city is from the outside looking in. The skyline of Manhattan tells a lot about the history and evolution of its building practices. Both Midtown and the Southern tip soar into the sky, while Downtown and the Upper parts of the island valley out. While New York City has historically been a testing ground for high-rise buildings, it is the traditional city composed of low-rise, dense urban fabric that lay the groundwork for the cityâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s grid. The grid delineated the public and private spaces of the city from streets, squares, courtyards, and parks to specifically zoned lots and districts. The spaces of the traditional city were activated by a diverse culture of programming that included residential, retail, institutional, etc. Over the last century, with the advancement of building technologies, the high-rise has more easily become a common building typology in the city. With more land being developed to its greatest floor-to-air ratio, the amount of developable land decreases. Concurrently, property values increase as well as the incentive to build taller and to build over the existing fabric of the city. The current condition of low-rise construction of traditional building practice is no longer the norm in Manhattan and other city centers. Some areas of the city that are under pressure to be built higher or built over should be preserved, especially those of traditional, low-rise neighborhoods where its success as an urban center need not be compromised. Contention In a situation where the high-rise structure exists within low-rise urban fabric to which the construction of that structure has compromised the spatial density of the previously existing physical environment, reintroducing and joining low-rise, mixed-use

The Wedding of Jane Jacobs & Le Corbusier

fabric to the high-rise structure, can restore spatial definition and diverse programming that provides vitality to an urban street. Surgically stitching together the high-rise and the low-rise will marry the architectural object of the city with its spatially dense fabric. Blending the two will employ their strengths as activators of urban life through the use of certain public spaces while eliminating some of their vices.

1. “To us the occassional virtues of the modern city seem to be patent and the problem remains how, while allowing for the need of a ‘modern’ declamation, to render these virtues responsive to circumstance.” Colin Rowe, and Fred Koetter, Collage City, (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1984), 8.

An Urban Problem In Collage City, architectural critics Colin Rowe and Fred Koetter describe the contemporary city as a condition of the new and the old being the architecture of the object and the city of spaces. Both urban strategies are no longer representative of current attitudes toward the city.1 As a result, combining the two by allowing the object to be absorbed in urban fabric, allows both the tower and the city of space to coexist. With the advent of the high-rise in the past century, housing tower developments became popular as an answer to some of the ills of urban density and congestion. The high-rise provided light and air, romantic views of the city, and offered an alternative style of urban living, one without a connection to the urban street and its activities. Much of the housing tower building construction was a result of Title 1 Slum Clearance in New York and other American cities. In the East Village of Manhattan between East 4th and East 6th Streets and Avenue A and 1st Avenue, there exists a high-rise housing development. Due to its construction in 1962, the existing low-rise fabric of this double block was bulldozed with only a small section of city fabric in its northeast corner remaining. The towers are surrounded by open space separating themselves from the street and its context. However, at its center lies a traditional inner block courtyard animated by the residents for its use a a park space.

The development is an island of singularly programmed towers within a sea of blocks of low-rise, physically and programmatically dense, urban fabric. The tower block acts against the cultural diversity found in the neighborhood of both programmed spaces and building type. The design problem lies at the edge of the site where because of the construction of the towers setback from the property line, programmatic diversity and vitality of the street’s edge are lost. Through the adaptive reuse of the towers and by mending the street’s edge to reflect the diversity of both building type and usage, the urban vitality of this block can be restored. Proposition The site’s context consists of low-rise fabric of mixed-use residential buildings. To mend the street’s edge, this context will reflect onto the site and adhere to the existing towers, carving into and reusing the high-rise structures in the lower levels. A hybrid condition of the two will be utilized as to employ the strengths of both in reclaiming urban vitality along the street’s edge by reintroducing the diversity lost in both building type and program. As a mixed-use residential prototype, it will be duplicated along the block’s edge in order to reutilize and reactive the ground plane as well as re-densify the site. As a prototype for reclaiming urban vitality lost from the construction of monocultural high-rise developments, these insertions can be made elsewhere in the city where this particular diversity and spatiality is lost.

Glossary item. Mixed-use residential protoype: one that is programmatic that lends itself to a spatial and physical density, but can be altered as specified by a given site. It is meant to act as a formula for similar urban problems based on population densities, unit types, spatial densities, programmatic diversity, and other factors (107)

The Wedding of Jane Jacobs & Le Corbusier

Surgical joining of low-rise urban fabric and the tower-in-the-park

2. “A TOWN is a tool. Towns no longer fulfil this function. They are ineffectual; they use up our bodies, they thwart our souls. The lack of order to be found everywhere in them offends us; their degradation wounds our selfesteem and humiliates our sense of dignity. They are not worthy of the age; they are no longer worthy of us. A city! It is the grip of man upon nature. It is a human operation directed against nature, a human organism both for protection and for work. It is a creation. Poetry is a human act-the harmonious relationships between perceived images. All the poetry we find in nature is but the creation of our own spirit.” Le Corbusier, The City of To-morrow and Its Planning, (New York: Payson & Clarke Ltd., 1971), xxi. Glossary item. Streetscape (107) 3. Richard Plunz, A History of Housing in New York City, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), 290.

The Wedding of Jane Jacobs & Le Corbusier

Romance Living in a city is like a romantic relationship. For the city there is love, there is hate, and yet always, there is romance. The romance of the city is attributable to its life and its diversity. What makes the city different from the town or the country is diversity.2 Diversity comes in the form of types of user, building program, and building type and age. Without diversity, the life of the city would not exist. It is on East 12th Street in the East Village of Manhattan, on my way to pick up macaroni and cheese, that I discovered the life of the city. While I frequented this street, as it had my favorite coffee shop on the corner, I had never witnessed it in the early evening. As I walked along the block and stood in the line for the macaroni-and-cheeseonly shop, I witnessed a diverse use of space within the block. The same street where I plug-in and enjoy a generously-sized cappuccino and also get my macaroni and cheese fix, talented skateboarders use the East Side Community High School’s outdoor court as a practice and performance ground. In turn, this creates a human barricade of spectators clinging to the court’s fence obscuring the view from the sidewalk. I saw how urban life is the ever-changing and constant movement and use of a city’s spaces. The interaction of the street, building, and block can effectively create that relationship. Nineteenth Century Streetscape According the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, a streetscape is the appearance or view of a street. Buildings, sidewalk, street, trees, etc. compose the appearance of a streetscape. Richard Plunz, architectural researcher and professor of architecture and urban design at Columbia University, uses the term 19th century streetscape in describing the elements of the street that create the low-rise urban neighborhoods of New York.3 It is the low-rise massing of the 19th century streetscape that is representative of traditional urban texture in New York, particularly in areas like the East Village. These residential neighborhoods are composed of low-rise urban fabric consisting of the streets,

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Figure 1. Boulevard Montmarte represents the 19th century streetscape of Paris. Camille Pissarro, 1897. Oil on canvas.

The Wedding of Jane Jacobs & Le Corbusier

sidewalks, and buildings that shape them(Figure 1).

4. Sharon Zukin, Naked City: The Death and Life of Authentic Urban Places, (New York: Oxford University Press, Inc., 2010), 106. 5. Population density per square mile for the area East of the Bowery, South of Rivington St., West of Norfolk St., and North of Division St. U.S. Census Bureau, 1900. Glossary item. Overcrowding: There are various factors that define overcrowding in housing as found by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development measured by persons-per-room, persons-per-bedroom, unit square footage-per-person, and person-per-room by unit square foot-perperson. A typical scale factor for overcrowding is no more than 2 persons per bedroom. (107) 6. Ibid., 2000. 7. Rob Krier, Urban Space, (London: Academy Editions, 1979), 17. Glossary item. Slums: According to United Nations Habitat, a slum is an area that combines to various extents the following characteristics --inadequate access to safe water, inadequate access to sanitation or other infrastructure, poor structural quality housing, overcrowding, or insecure residential status. (107)

A History of Housing in the Lower East Side The Lower East Side embodies this streetscape type. At the turn of the last century, an influx of immigrants brought with it a great need for urban housing. Developed in the Lower East Side, the tenement typology answered to the demands of the poorer masses of people coming to the city. Sharon Zukin, an urban sociologist in New York who studies the reshaping of cities through political, economic, and cultural factors of consumption, describes the history of tenement building in downtown Manhattan, “Most (tenements) were built in only two years, 1899 and 1900, when the small developers and contractors who built tenement housing heard about the impending passage of a new law that would require them to make a new king of low-rent apartment in which every room had access to daylight and fresh air.”4 In turn, the low-rise tenement brought densities in the Lower East Side to 433,986 persons per square mile in 1900, about 678 persons per acre.5 Today this density would be defined as overcrowding. The most recently published census data demonstrates high population densities throughout the Lower East Side as ranging from 100 to over 150 persons per acre.6 This is a more comfortable density as learned from the congestion and overcrowding at the turn of the past century producing detrimental living conditions. Architectural and urban theorist Rob Krier describes the evolutionary history of the street as being “a product of the spread of a settlement once houses have been built on all available space around its central square. (The street layouts) were planned to the scale of the human being, the horse, and the carriage.”7 Many areas of the city have been testing grounds for residential building types. In the Lower East Side alone, there exist various housing types(Figure 2). Innovations in building technologies over time and demands for housing produced a range of building types. The built landscape of the Lower East Side at the turn of the past century was low-rise fabric composed of tenements and cold water flats, walk-ups, and row houses. As the city was built up and developable land was harder to come by, variations and rebuilding began to take place in the form of converting warehouse spaces to live-work lofts or in the clearing slums which in many cases, resulted in replacing old city fabric with residential towers. Innovations in technology provided higher building typologies

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and variations from typical brick and mortar construction. Condominiums and apartment buildings built of steel frame construction with cladding, make up much of the new construction of housing in the Lower East Side. Attack on the “Corridor Street” Le Corbusier, modernist urban theorist and architect, gave birth to the idea of the Cartesian skyscraper(Figure 3).8 The Cartesian skyscraper was conceived from his research on urban theory and planning, most notably from his publication La Ville Radieuse or The Radiant City. The ideas and designs for the Radiant City manifested from the conditions of traditional urban centers being overcrowded and congested. He dealt with issues of light and air where dense urban centers were failing. He also saw traffic and vehicular movement through cities as being detrimental to urban life resulting in the death of the street in its traditional sense. The inclusion of the car provided the end to the corridor street in the traditional city. The purpose of the corridor street for the pedestrian and the horse, being the original patrons of its design, was lost. In the Radiant City, the entire ground surface would be given over to the pedestrian removing the user from any interaction with vehicles.9 “The Skyscraper has been built above yesterday’s streets”10 The Cartesian skyscraper rests upon a set of piloti providing complete occupation and freedom of the ground level for the pedestrian. In the masterplan for the Radiant City, Le Corbusier set skyscrapers at great distances apart from one another within a park-like landscape. The area for skyscrapers was planned to accommodate a super-density of 3200 persons per hectare, about 7,900 persons per acre.11 However, in Le Corbusier’s plan, the skyscrapers were only programmed for commercial and business spaces, not residential. The tower-in-the-park, born from the Cartesian skyscraper, became a normative building practice for residential architecture in American cities like New York, in the form of the tower block. However, the typology envisioned by Le Corbusier was misused. Frederick Etchells, in an introduction to Le Corbusier’s The City of To-morrow And Its Planning, writes, “Le Corbusier adopts the sky-scraper as his most important unit, but he makes of it a very different use from that which has obtained in New York with what seem to be unhappy results. His sky-scrapers are set at immense distances from

Glossary item. Cartesian skyscraper - high-rise building typology, cruciform in shape to provide for light and air, postulated by Modernist urban theorist Le Corbusier 8. Le Corbusier, The radiant city: elements of a doctrine of urbanism to be used as the basis of our machine-age civilization, (London: Faber and Faber, 1967), 131. Glossary item. Corridor street - a passageway that carves through the physical environs of a built environment, like a city, originally purposed for the pedestrian and the horse 9. Ibid., 108. 10. This comes from an English translation of Ville Radieuse in which Le Corbusier is describing skyscrapers in American cities but more notably in Manhattan as being packed together and not relating to the scale of the pedestrian. Where the ‘corridor street’ is lost, so is the human scale in the exploitation of the use of the Cartesian skyscraper in urban centers. Ibid., 128. 11. Ibid., 131.

The Wedding of Jane Jacobs & Le Corbusier

Tenement, Cold Water Flats | multi-family residence with commercial/retial spaces on ground and sub-ground floors Lower East Side Tenement Museum 108 Orchard Street

1863

Row House | built for single family typically converted to two family dwelling 28 East 2nd Street

1899

Walk-up | residential units on upper floors with stair access and commercial/retail space at grade 93 Allen Street

Walk-up | residential units on upper floors with stair access and commercial/retail space at grade 132 Ludlow Street

Lofts | residential units by floor with open plan typically converted from industrial spaces 175 Ludlow Street

1900

Figure 2. Study of housing typologies in Lower East Side organized on a timeline. The Lower East Side acted as a testing ground for different housing typologies as different building construction technologies were introduced and as the area continued to densify.

Walk-up | resident floors with stair ac commercial/retial 173 Orchard Stree

1920

tial units on upper ccess and l space at grade et

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Tower Block | high-rise multi-family apartment building with elevator access New York City Public Housing 224 Eldridge Street

1970

Infill Block Housing | low-rise multi-family apartment block with stair access L.E.S. Infill Public Housing 1 196 Eldridge Street

1986

Condominiums | one residential unit per floor 56 East 1st Street

2002

High-rise Condominiums | residential units on upper floors and commercial/retail space at grade Blue Tower | 105 Norfolk Street

2005

Apartment Building | residential units on all floors with elevator access 62 East 1st Street

2007

The Wedding of Jane Jacobs & Le Corbusier

Figure 3. Le Corbusier, Plan Voisin, 1925.

one another; they are surrounded by large open spaces or parks, and they are allocated to commercial, not residential, purposes; the great tenement houses and other building being relatively low in height.”12 Le Corbusier planned for his residents of the Radiant City to live in blocks of ‘villas’, that were located in a separate quarter than that of the high-rises. The residential quarters would be at a density of 1,000 persons per hectare, about 2,500 persons per acre.13 The low-rise housing would occupy only 15 percent of ground coverage with the rest as open space in the form of parks and recreation spaces. It is important to note that a critique is being placed on how Le Corbusier’s contentions have been used in practice and exploited in regards to the tower-in-the-park typology. The high-rise was misused from its original meaning in Le Corbusier’s doctrine. The foundations for the argument of the Cartesian skyscraper were valid. However, its execution in the form of urban high-rise residential developments have not always proven so.

12. Le Corbusier, The City of To-morrow And Its Planning, (London: John Rodker Publisher, 1929), xi. 13. Le Corbusier, The radiant city: elements of a doctrine of urbanism to be used as the basis of our machine-age civilization, (London: Faber and Faber, 1967), 131.

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The Death and Life of an Urban Block Le Corbusier’s project for the city center of Saint-Die illustrates his modernist urban planning ideas. The corridor street is stripped from its plan. Where the ‘corridor street’ creates a clear opposition in the form of the street’s wall separating the private space within the block from the public space of the street, the modernistic urban street does not. In the corridor street scenario, the street has some ownership over the building’s facade as it acts rather as a wall to the street than covering or curtain to a building.14 In Saint-Die, the buildings act as sculptural figures in the ground. This is quite opposite to that of the traditional city’s figure-ground relationship in which the private is ground and the public is figural(Figure 4). In the traditional sense, public spaces representing the void are carved out of the private being the solid. The project for the city center of Saint-Die represents the city of object.15 On the other end of the urban theory spectrum is Jane Jacobs. Not being an academic, she wrote from her experience and passion from living in New York City, in her book The Death and Life of Great American Cities. She identifies the built environment as attributable to enabling community a place worth preserving. The success of the low-rise urban neighborhoods is dependent on many things, the diversity of the block in building type and age, users, and uses. “No neighborhood or district, no matter how well established, prestigious or well heeled, and no matter how intensely populated for one purpose, can flout the necessity for spreading people through time of day without frustrating its potential for generating diversity. Furthermore, a neighborhood or district perfectly calculated, it seems, to fill on function, whether work or any other, and with everything ostensibly necessary to the function, cannot actually provide what is necessary if it is confined to that one function.”16 Her argument lies in the necessity of the block to be used throughout the day’s cycle. A business district, for example, is only in use during business hours. During the offhours, the streets of that part of the city are vacant. Vacant streets are perceived as unsafe to the vulnerable pedestrian. When a district is zoned for many purposes, activity on the street occurs at various times throughout the day. A residential block has users going to and from its buildings at all times of day. Bars and restaurants provide nightlife in the form of users to the street and sidewalks. Retail spaces may contribute additional

14. James Holston, The Modernist City: an anthropological critique of Brasilia, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 257-258. 15. Colin Rowe, and Fred Koetter, Collage City, (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1984), 59-64.

16. Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, (New York: Vintage Books, 1961), 160.

Figure 4. Figure-ground comparison between Lower Manhattan and Wiesbaden. Right: Wiesbaden, 1900, figure-ground plan. Colin Rowe, and Fred Koetter, Collage City, (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1984), 59-64.

The Wedding of Jane Jacobs & Le Corbusier

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users to the sidewalks on weekends. Essentially the district needs to be programmed for a variety of uses in order to attract a variety of users at different times in the day. The Fight Robert Moses was a mid-century urban planner notable for his planning and abilities to realize a great deal of infrastructure in the United States and specifically New York. In the case for preserving her own neighborhood, the West Village, which urban planner Robert Moses was attempting to bulldoze through Title 1 Slum Clearance in the 1960’s, Jacobs wrote a strong critique against the practices of urban renewal.17 Her experiences from living in the West Village, proved for her that a neighborhood, in order to be considered safe, had to provide sidewalks viable for child’s play and have the eyes of the street being the shop-owners at street level or having a visual connection from the dwelling unit to the street. She was critical of modernist approaches to city planning as they did not provide these necessities for the urban block. For example, the tower-in-the-park with its height and setbacks from the street erase the visual connection to the street or the programmatic diversity at grade found in traditional mixed-use blocks. It is the diversity and density of the district that create this sense of community she describes that is a result of the built environment. Plunz documents the housing project that was planned in the 1960’s to clear the West Village of its slums. The preliminary plans by Perkins and Will included hous-

17. Ibid., 207.

Figure 5. In The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jacobs identifies certain elements of the built environment that create sucessful urban neighborhoods. A tree-lined street, a street viable for child’s play, and a diversity of building type along the block are just a few of her theories of the successes of urban planning.

18. Richard Plunz, A History of Housing in New York City, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), 308.

19. Another change for housing: low-rise alternatives; Brownsville, Brooklyn, Fox Hills, Staten Island, [Catalogue of ] an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, (June 12-August 19, 1973), 5. 20. Look at Marcus Garvey Housing precedent as a low-rise prototypical housing study from the Museum of Modern Art’s exhibition Another chance for housing: low-rise alternatives; Brownsville, Brooklyn, Fox Hills, Staten Island, on page 51.

The Wedding of Jane Jacobs & Le Corbusier

ing towers. However, an alternative design was pursued after the neighborhood opposed the project. In place of the housing towers, a grouping of low-rise residences were designed. West Village Houses, forty-two five-story walk-ups came out of the battle between the ideas of urban renewal from city planner Robert Moses and Jane Jacobs, the neighborhood activist and preservationist. The argument for the low-rise was to “preserve the existing fabric through small-scale infill and diversity of scale and use within the neighborhood.”18 In the fight for the West Village, the city of Jane Jacobs won. Tall or Short: That is the Question Another argument, quite closely related to Jacobs, was presented in the form of an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in 1973. Another chance for housing looked at low-rise alternatives to high-rise housing project in the United States. The catalogue describes how low-rise housing typologies perform within a neighborhood, “Low rise housing lends itself particularly well to reinforcing the nature and use of the street. It is the confusion between public and private that has led to the breakdown of both in so much recent building, and a reassertion of the separate and equally necessary roles of public and private space applies to the design of high rise as well as low rise housing...furthermore, such housing projects often seem not to fit in with the surrounding neighborhood, but rather apart from it.”19 This exhibition was also placing criticism on the Urban Development Corporation within the United States for creating additional urban problems such as social ones, in the failures of some high-rise residential projects as well as the lost relationship between the public and private realms. This critique became a design problem for reasserting the human scale and diverse nature of a neighborhood back into the city.20 A popular approach to residential building in the city, as used by the Urban Development Corporation, was the tower-in-the-park building typology. While Le Corbusier postulated the idea for the Cartesian skyscraper, the tower-in-the-park found its home as a residential type in many American cities including New York. This type of construction worked on the model of slum clearance in which entire areas of the city were designated at slums, and through Title 1 slum clearance, were able to be bulldozed for complete new construction. These areas defined as slums were identified as being deficient in light and air and lacked enough ground space to relieve

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the congestion of the high densities. Stuyvesant Town, a large residential development just north of the East Village tangent to 1st Avenue, is an embodiment of the tower-in-the-park duplicated many times over on the site. Upon walking through the development, the noises and bustle of the city are immediately lost. The abundance of green space, winding streets and paths provide a completely different and opposing environment to the streets of Manhattan. In creating this development, one could argue that a great amount of green space was given back to the city. However, this was on the grounds that this green space, stretching nine blocks of the island, is private property. A Breathing Exercise The diversity and life of the traditional, mixed-use urban block are not present in the interwinding, almost scenic streets of Stuyvesant Town. The singular residential program brings with it quietness and calmness internal to the site, acting almost as a relief from the ceaseless activity of the city. As a free-standing object, it feeds off of and breathes the air of the city to which it has created a bubble from, making the exterior a result of its interior.21 The exterior of the development could be perceived as an autonomous object as it makes no connection to its context and gives little to its streets’ edges(Figure 6). The development is a free-standing bubble not penetrated by the city, yet it needs the city’s mixed program and infrastructure in order to exist. How do building sections affect urban space? Bringing back the example of the lively block in the East Village, it is not only the diversity of the building types and program that produced the life of the block, but is also a result of the way in which the ground plane is used. The spatial uses of the block alone brings with it a variety of users. While a buildings’ programs and public spaces perform specific functions, the spaces change and inform each other throughout the day. As in the previous example, the East Side Community High School’s outdoor court is used for a variety of different purposes from a basketball court during physical education courses offered at the high school to a performance ground for talented skateboarders after school hours. It is the way in which people use the public spaces of the block that define its activity. Although the block is typified as residential, its mixed-uses provide energy to its streets by the activation of the ground plane.

21. Rowe and Koetter quote Le Corbusier in Towards a New Architecture (167), “A building is like a soap bubble. This bubble is perfect and harmonious if the breath has been evenly distributed from the inside. The exterior is the result of an interior.” Colin Rowe, and Fred Koetter, Collage City, (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1984), 56.

Figure 6. Le Corbusier, Villa Radieuse. Colin Rowe, and Fred Koetter, Collage City, (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1984), 51. Right: Interior of Stuyvesant Town high-rise residential development.

The Wedding of Jane Jacobs & Le Corbusier

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In the scenario of East 12th Street, the activated street attracts a variety of users because of the spaces it provides them. The interaction of the street with the public spaces interior to the block happen at the street’s edge. This interaction is lost in the tower-in-the-park scenario. Residential towers are setback from the sidewalk as to provide the necessary privacy for the units at the ground plane, and accommodate the necessary zoning setbacks for the buildings’ heights. The high-rise high density building type provides more open space at the ground plane than does a low-rise high density building type because of the decrease in ground coverage. The street wall where the building’s edge would typically meet the sidewalk is replaced by hedges, fencing, and edges of parking lots. The sidewalk becomes deactivated working as an infrastructural element on Manhattan’s grid for the pedestrian. The sidewalk becomes an external site condition as its use is not related to the site. The examples of the deactivated and activated street wall in figure 8 are on East 4th Street and Avenue A, respectively. The streetscape on East 4th Street captures the street wall of a tower-in-the-park typology. Avenue A, on the same block, has low-rise urban fabric creating a street wall of building frontage versus green space. The edge along East 4th Street consists of sidewalk, fence, parking lot or sidewalk, rail, hedge, grass. Along Avenue A, the edge consists of sidewalk, building front. The building fronts include entrances, windows, signage, different building materials, lighting, graffiti, etc. In Le Corbusier’s City of To-morrow And Its Planning, Etchells describes how a traffic regulation on a particular street creating a variance to regular traffic patterns may “destroy much of street’s value as a means of access to buildings fronting upon the street.”22 One could argue that a variance to buildings fronting upon the street in a typical urban setting also destroy much of the street’s value in terms of traffic patterns. If buildings are setback from the property line, the relationship between the buildings and the street is no longer directly linked. The street and sidewalk may no longer act as an artery to what it is tangent to. If the public space of the street and sidewalk is not directly linked to what goes on at the property line there lies the question if what goes on behind the property line actually affects the street. As in the diagram illustrating the activated and deactivated sidewalks, the moment where the buildings do front upon the street, there is no direct link between the users of the pedestrian sidewalk and the

22. Le Corbusier, The City of To-morrow And Its Planning, (London: John Rodker Publisher, 1929), xi.

The Wedding of Jane Jacobs & Le Corbusier

private residential development that exists beyond the plot line. Yet in the example with buildings lining the property line, the users of the public space are linked to the space tangent to the public space as they may either be using that public space as a means to cross over to the private space or may be affected by the close visual connection of the public and the private. It is the diversity of the spaces of the street that determines its activation and use. If that diversity is lost at grade, so is its activation. It is the interaction across the plot line that is critical in that it animates the street. The Street’s Wall: Its Reclamation In the East Village, a high-rise housing development sits among a sea of low-rise urban fabric. Five towers are situated on a double block site at East 4th and 6th Streets and 1st Avenue and Avenue A. Five low-rise mixed-use buildings remain from the original city fabric prior to the site’s bulldozing for the residential development, in the northeast corner of the site. There is a stark contrast between the high-rise towers and the low-rise context. The high-rise towers are set back from the plot line while the low-rise buildings were built tangent to the property line. If the block were to reclaim the street’s wall, the public space adjacent to the plot line would then be activated by the site(Figure 8). By mending the street’s edge through creating an interaction across the plot line between building and public space, the public would in turn be animated. Opposites Attract In order to create this interaction across the plot line, a relationship between building and public space needs to be made. This is where opposites, Jane Jacobs and Le Corbusier, attract. The tower-in-the-park typology on the site can be stitched to lowrise urban fabric in order to mend the street’s edge and create an interaction with the public space that was lost on the site as a result of the towers’ setbacks from the plot line. Urban theorist Leon Krier describes existing urbanisms as ones of financial exploitation of land in which a cycle of climbing land values leads to an increase in building heights coined as Manhattanism. New Urbanism critiques developmental and planning principles of existing urbanisms. The strategies of urban planning and development can be employed in maintaining many of the principles of traditional town

Avenue A Streetscape

Walking to library

Walking to catch bus

Walking home

lis

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ba nd

Window shopping

Browsing

Trip to get ice cream

t rist Tou

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East 4th St. Streetscape

Figure 7. Activated vs. Deactivated Streetâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Edge. On the right is the streetscape of East 4th Street on the site. On the left is the streetscape of Avenue A on site. While they both exist on the same block, each attracts a different set of users, and the activated streetscape also engages the user with the streetâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s edge.

23. Leon Krier, Architecture: choice or fate, (Windsor: Andreas Papadakis Publisher, 1998), 105.

24. Rob Krier, Urban Space, (New York: Rizzoli International Publishers, 1979), 15.

25. Colin Rowe and Fred Koetter, Collage City, (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1984), 83.

The Wedding of Jane Jacobs & Le Corbusier

planning. Some developmental tasks in redefining city centers are to build to the perimeter of the block and complete fragmented areas(urban infill), to keep in harmony with existing patterns in the urban fabric(urban order), to remove single-use buildings as they are “programmed functional monotony and create formal poverty”, to adjust plotratios, and to reintroduce the necessary range of functions within a comfortable walking distance(Figure 9).23 New Urbanism uses the traditional city as precedent for postulating ways to mend the issues that have arose from the design and planning of contemporary cities. The city of urban space is a relationship of public and private with public space carved out of private fabric. Rob Krier describes urban space as being geometrically bounded by a variety of elevations. It is only the clear legibility of its geometrical characteristics and aesthetic qualities which allow us consciously to perceive external space as urban space.24 The tower-in-the-park typology is quite the opposite as the private space of the tower is figural within the field of public space. Rowe and Koetter describe the architecture of the object within the city of spaces in the Crisis of the Object: Predicament of Texture, “Rather than hoping and waiting for the withering away of the object, it might be judicious, in most cases, to allow and encourage the object to become digested in a prevalent texture or matrix. It is further suggested that neither object nor space fixation are, in themselves, any longer representative of valuable attitudes. The one may, indeed, characterize the ‘new’ city and the other the old; but, if there are situations which must be transcended rather than emulated, the situation to be hoped for should be recognized as one in which both buildings and space exist in an equality of sustained debate.”25 The tower and the city of urban space can coexist. Rowe and Koetter postulate the collage of the old and the new, the city of spaces and the city of object. While arguing that neither may be solely representative of the contemporary city, it is the stitching of the two together that embodies the current urban environment. The design problem for the site becomes an issue of collaging the two typologies. The high-rise and low-rise can properly marry as to blend the virtues of both. The insertion of low-rise to the site will reintroduce urban space in its traditional sense redefining its tangential interaction of public and private. By reintroducing the street wall as a reflection of its context of low scale mixed-use fabric, this interaction across the plot

Urban Surgery

line will reactivate the block. The ground plane will be reoccupied by a diverse culture of programming recapturing the life of the urban block. In addition, the housing program will provide added density to the site. As a result, a hybrid relationship of the low-rise and high-rise will be created. One could argue there is a sense of disorder or formal poverty due to the absence of a street wall. There is no physically defined urban space. Rather the high-rise towers act as figural elements like a free-standing bubble breathing the air of the city but not interacting with it. In turn, their figural quality lends to the poverty of the formal ordering of the street. The design problem becomes an issue of urban order and context as the stitching of the two introduces the interaction with the street and a juxtaposition of scale. Not all activity is lost on the site. There are moments within the siteâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s core where sidewalk societies meet, residents walk their dogs, and children play. It is those spaces internal to the site that need not be lost as they do provide animation to the

Figure 8. Sectional perspective through East 4th Street looking East

The Wedding of Jane Jacobs & Le Corbusier

site. It is the spaces of the periphery that would benefit from programmatic diversity and reoccupation of the ground plane. As the high-rise exists in low-rise context, it seems natural to stitch the two together to exert the strengths of both. It is in establishing an interaction across the plot line, reengaging the public space of the city with the site and providing programmatic diversity, that will activate its public spaces that were forfeited when the spatial definition of the block was lost.

Figure 9. Masterplan for Florence-Novoli. Leon Krier, Architecture: choice or fate, (Windsor: Andreas Papadakis Publisher, 1998), 111.

The Wedding of Jane Jacobs & Le Corbusier

Figure 1. Panoramic view of site from corner of East 4th Street and 1st Avenue

Site Analysis

Site: The East Village & the High-Rise

There exists a residential tower development in the East Village of Manhattan located on a double block site extending between East 4th and East 6th Streets and Avenue A and 1st Avenue. On the double tower block are five towers of heights either 142 or 184 feet above the surrounding urban neighborhood of low-rise, physical fabric. The towers are setback from the street and property lines appropriated among green, park-like spaces and parking lots both at the streetâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s edge and in the interior of the block. At the Northeast corner of the site along Avenue A, there exist five pre-war, lowrise and mid-rise buildings that remain prior to the construction of the housing development in 1962. Manhattan was designed on an angled grid with wide avenues and shorter cross streets. In the East Village, the avenues are numbered descending in order eastward and continue alphabetically. The streets are numbered descending in order southward and terminate at Houston Street. The double-block site exists where the numbered avenues end and the alphabetic avenues begins. In turn, straddling the neighborhoods nomenclated the East Village and Alphabet City. In addition, the condition exists, and is zoned as such, that higher floor-to-area ratios are allowed along avenues and lower along streets creating spaces for commerce, retail, and institutional activity along avenues and mainly residential zoned streets. In figure 1, a panoramic view at the edge of the site shows the wider avenue versus the street. The site itself demonstrates a clear juxtaposition between two types of building and developmental strategies for urban architecture as it fits within the allowable floor-to-area ratios in this zoned district of the Lower East Side. As seen in an aerial image of the site in figure 2, an island of towers sit within a sea of low-rise urban fabric.

Figure 2. Double-block site within a sea of physically dense, urban fabric

The Wedding of Jane Jacobs & Le Corbusier

Plan and Elevation Analysis The open space on the site is developed park space and circulation. Public pedestrian pathways weave through the site connecting the site’s edge to the inner block. There are three circular park spaces, two with children’s play areas and one with a court for outdoor sports activites. As the pathways cutting through the site are public, there are several types of users. In figure 4, an overlay of a sketch in the field, the diagram represents how I witnessed the site as it was used by pedestrians and others. The red user represents an assumed resident of the housing development as delineated by their action or path, and the black represents others as users of urban, public space again as delineated by their passage through or around the site.

Figure 3. Field sketch from site visit November 21, 2011. 1. In addition to the five towers on this doubleblock site, there exist two towers built by the same development corporation at the same time of construction, with the same typical floor plan and tower heights, located along 1st Avenue at the corners of East 3rd Street and East 2nd Street.

The towers vary in height but all have a similar, typical floor plan, some flipped vertically in plan.1 The ground level of each tower has two entrances on either side that enter into the centers of the towers, the circulation corridor for the towers’ residents. Exterior pathways are provided to both entryways, delineated by their angled symmetries from the body of the towers, and connect both to the interior of the site as well as the site’s edge. The circulation corridor is raised above grade. Inside the ground level hosts laundry facilities, service, and postal mail spaces for the buildings’ tenants. The buildings are key access. There are a few apartments on the wings of the ground level. While only a few steps above grade, these apartments gain their privacy from the blocked-off green space surrounding each of the towers. This space harbors signs stating no trespassing or no walking on grass, and are fenced off by either low, garden fencing, hedges and shrubery, or higher, chain-link fences. The apartments above range from studio to two-bedroom apartments for both singles and families. The layout consists of a central corrdior through the middle of each of the towers never meeting an exterior face, with each apartment tangent to the hallway optimiz-

Site Analysis

Figure 4. Overlay on field sketch from site visit November 21, 2011.

The Wedding of Jane Jacobs & Le Corbusier

ing natural daylight for each room. The towers are programmed solely for residential use. No other program exists on the site besides at the Northeast corner where the existing city fabric remains with retail at grade. Surrounding the site is low-rise fabric of mostly residential program with some retail spaces zoned at grade, especially along the avenues. There also is a religious space, a school, and another institutional space opposite the site (Figure 7). In the elevations on the following spread, the streets and the avenues read differently. The northside of the block on East 6th Street consists of traditional low-rise urban fabric while the southside of East 4th Street does not. Its buildings are larger in scale and act more as object then texture. There is a clear difference between the opposite sides of the street and how the floor-to-area ratios were manipulated to produce more open ground space.

Figures 5,6,7. Axonometric diagrams of buildings on site and its immediate surroundings.

Site Analysis

Figures 8,9,10. Typical Structural Plan, Ground Floor Plan, and Upper Level Floor Plan of an Existing Tower on site. Scale 1’-0”=1/4” ers Typical Plans for Existing Tow l Floor Plan Level Floor Plan 3. Upper Leve 1. Structural Plan 2. Ground

The Wedding of Jane Jacobs & Le Corbusier

E 4th St Northside

East 6th Street Northside East 6th Street Southside

Site Elevations: The Streets

Site Analysis

E 4th St Northside

East 4th Street Northside East 4th Street Southside E 6th St Southside

Site Elevations: The Avenues

1st Avenue Eastside

The Wedding of Jane Jacobs & Le Corbusier

1st Avenue Westside

Avenue A Eastside

Avenue A Westside Site Analysis 39

The Wedding of Jane Jacobs & Le Corbusier Diversity of users found in the interior of the block on site: sidewalk society, unsupervised children on bicycles, children accompanied by guardian, dogwalkers High-rise within landscape: small-scale entryway, visual connection from balconies on the lower floors of towers to interior park space

Programmatic diversity at grade on northside of East 6th Street, facing the site, from corner at Avenue A Programmed spaces occupy low-rise, mixed-use residential, pre-war buildings

Site Analysis

East 5th Street Corridor The residential development bifurcates East 5th Street from through vehicular traffic. There is pedestrian corridor that cuts through the site where East 5th Street once was. Along the East 5th Street corridor are adjacent park spaces including a paved court for outdoor sports and childrensâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; play areas. The corridor and adjacent pathways weave through the site from the towers to the siteâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s boundaries. The programmed spaces in the interior of the block animate the site and provide a safe atmosphere where residents feel comfortable using the space freely and children do not have to be under direct supervision of a guardian. It speaks much to Jane Jacobsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s description of an animated street. The pedestrian corridor serves both the residents and users of the city as it provides a quiet, tree-lined cut-through from the east to the west of the double-block site. While this corridor disrupts the city street grid, in this instance it has many benefits to its use for this site than it might to the city as a vehicular passage.

Daily Sun Paths and Solar Angles by Month

January

February

March

April

May

June

July

August

September N

October N

November N

December N

Site Analysis

The Site Condition: Past and Present The East Village, as a portion of the Lower East Side, has historically been a physically dense environment of low-rise fabric. In the middle of the last century, there were many incentives to clear portions of the city that were deteriorating and suffering from the ills of congestion of both high population and building densities. Through Title 1 slum clearance, high-rise developments, like the Village View Housing Development on the site, provided light and air and more ground space as well as a new way of housing high densities of people within the city. As a design problem of combining the high-rise residential tower, a solution to a past urban issue, and low-rise fabric, the physical environment of the traditional city, a hybrid of the two must be obtained through studying the ways in which the low-rise will interact and join with the high-rise. Refer to the diagrams on the following spread.

Pre-1962 Possible Condition

Site After Clearing

Current Condition

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Reclaiming the blockâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s edge with a depth of 100â&#x20AC;&#x2122; into the site

Preserving the East 5th Street corridor by cutting through massing

Preserving the existing circulation to and from towers by cutting through massing

Preserving the circulation to and from towers by creating passageways through massing

Site Analysis

Program-Site Fit Diagrams Pre-Design

Adding vertical space as terraces, setback from property line, continuing walls of existing towers

Reflecting the massing of the siteâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s context

Playing with stacked volumes and the porosity of the streetâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s wall

Interplay of different residential building types found in the Lower East Side

Project References and Resources Urban Housing Characteristics

Visual Conditions of the Lower East Side

Contemporary Urban Housing in Manhattan

Extractions from the Building Code of the City of New York

Extractions from the City of New York Parks & Recreation Extractions from the Fire Code of New York State

Extractions from the Zoning Code of the City of New York

Living Space

Bathroom

Kitchen and Dining Spaces

Bedroom and Storage Spaces

The Wedding of Jane Jacobs & Le Corbusier

Urban Housing Characteristics Within the housing program, there are more public and invariably private spaces. It is important in configuring the relationships of those spaces and their necessary connections. As illustrated in figure 10, there are typical configurations of spaces and spatial overlaps determing by the necessity of privacy, daylighting, and circulation. The public and private spaces are designated as living and sleeping zones, respectively. Other than single space housing typologies like the efficiency or studio apartment, these two zones are typically delineated and separated by circulation spaces, one being entry. Certain spaces are configured in importance of natural daylighting. The outer zone represents the spaces with an exterior wall. In an urban environment, the amount of exterior wall surface area can be very limiting. Therefore, spaces that may take precedence for the amount of time spent or comfortability are living and bedroom spaces. The towers are able to achieve a higher building height as they utilize the necessary setback. With the varying heights of the towers, the allowable floor-to-air ratio is not exceeded. As a result, there is less ground coverage of building footprint and more open space for parks and parking. The typical residential building types in the residential quarters of a city are mixed-use and solely residential classified by occupany M for Mercantile and R-2 for Multi-family Residential. The mixed-use typically exists on the avenues and bleeds off from the corners at the avenues along blocks. There are many variations on these residential building types having to do with the orgnization of the mercantile space and the types of residential uses. For example, a sunken commercial space in what would be considered the basement area with either a commercial space on the first floor accessible by steps or residential space beginning on the first floor is a variation. Residential spaces can also be configured differently according to their specific use and occupancy type. In a communal residence situation, sleeping spaces are typically pushed along the buildingâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s exterior in order to provide for light and air to the sleeping units with communal spaces being at the center. In live-work housing, the space is zoned in order for the occupant to be able to use the space as a place of work such as a studio attached to his or her sleeping and living spaces. Some artist lofts in SoHo have studio spaces in the front portion of the loft and living spaces in the back.

Figures 1-4 on opposite page, Figure 5. John Macsai, Housing, (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1982), 23.

The Wedding of Jane Jacobs & Le Corbusier

Visual Conditions of Housing in the Lower East Side Also refer to Figure 2 in Urban Surgery on page 14

Buildings

Material

Style

Deteriority

Fenestration

Streetscape and Order

Continuity

Height

Character

Streetscape by Type

Infill Housing Block

Streets

Avenues

Tower Block

Contemporary Urban Housing in Manhattan Housing study of contemporary realized and unbuilt work of residential types

643 East 11th Street, East Village 6 storey elevator building. Residential. Built 2008

The Wedding of Jane Jacobs & Le Corbusier

HL23, Neil M. Denari Architects, West 23rd Street, West Chelsea 14 storey luxury condominiums. Residential. Built 2011

Figure. Picture of HL23 taken from High Line Park. From personal library.

Switch Building, nARCHITECTS, Norfolk Street, Lower East Side 7 storey apartment building and art gallery space. Built 2007

Figure. Picture of Switch Building taken from Norfold Street. nARCHITECTS.

The Wedding of Jane Jacobs & Le Corbusier

8 Spruce Street, Frank Gehry Architects, Lower Manhattan 76 storey luxury condominiums, public elementary school, hospital space, indoor public plaza. Built 2010

Figure. Picture of 8 Spruce Street tower also known as New York by Gehry. Frank Gehry Architects.

56 Leonard, Herzog & De Meuron, TriBeCa 58 storey luxury condominiums. Residential. Unbuilt

Figure. Rendering of 56 Leonard Street project. Herzog & De Meuron.

The Wedding of Jane Jacobs & Le Corbusier

Extractions from the Building Code of the City of New York ยง[C26-103.4] 27-118 Alterations involving change in occupancy or use.(a) Except as otherwise provided for in this section, if the alteration of a building or space therein results in a change in the occupancy group classification of the building under the provisions of subchapter three, then the entire building shall be made to comply with the requirements of this code. FLOOR AREA (NET).-When used to determine the occupant load of a space, shall mean the horizontal occupiable area within the space, excluding the thickness of walls, and partitions, columns, furred-in spaces, fixed cabinets, equipment, and accessory spaces such as closets, machine and equipment rooms, toilets, stairs, halls, corridors, elevators and similar unoccupied spaces. HIGH RISE.-A structure seventy-five feet or more in height. LOW RISE.-A structure less than seventy-five feet in height. MULTIPLE DWELLING.-A building containing three or more dwelling units. Multiple dwelling shall not be deemed to include a hospital, school, convent, monastery, asylum or other public institution. OUTER COURT.-Any open area, other than a yard or portion thereof, that is unobstructed from its lowest level to the sky and that, except for an outer court opening upon a street line, a front yard, or a rear yard, is bounded by either building walls or building walls and one or more lot lines other than a street line. STREET.-A thoroughfare dedicated or devoted to public use by legal mapping or other lawful means. STREET FLOOR.-A floor, usually the principal entrance floor, that is not more than onehalf story above or below grade at the location from which egress is provided to the street.

Project References and Resources

STREET LINE.-A lot line separating a street from other land. VAULT (SIDEWALK).-Any space below the surface of the sidewalk portion of a street, that is covered over, except those openings that are used exclusively as places for descending, by means of steps, to the cellar or basement of any building. STORAGE B-1 public garages MERCANTILE C Retail stores; shops; sales rooms; markets ASSEMBLY F-4 Restaurants; night clubs; cabarets; dance halls; ballrooms; banquet rooms; cafeterias; snack bars; taverns; coffee houses RESIDENTIAL J-2 Apartment houses J-3 One-family and two-family dwellings FRONTAGE. - Every building, exclusive of accessory buildings, shall have at least eight per cent of the total perimeter of the building fronting directly upon a street or frontage space. ARTICLE 7 HEIGHT LIMITATIONS Measurement. - In applying the provisions of this code governing height limits, the following appurtenant structures shall not be included in the height of the building unless the aggregate area of all such structures exceeds thirty-three and one-third percent of the area of the roof of the building upon which they are erected: (a) Roof tanks and their supports. (b) Ventilating, air conditioning, and similar building service equipment. (c) Roof structures, bulkheads, and penthouses. (d) Chimneys. (e) Parapet walls four feet or less in height. Sidewalk cafes. provided the sides of such enclosures do not extend more than eight feet above the sidewalk. (2) Awnings supported entirely from the building may be placed over sidewalk cafes provided they are at least eight feet clear above the sidewalk. MIXED USE BUILDING. - Any building occupied in part for residential use, with one or more nonresidential uses located on a story below the lowest story occupied entirely by such residential use.

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First story openings. - Opening protectives required by table 3-4 may be omitted in show windows or other openings on the lowest story of a building facing on a street or public space. Mixed occupancy. - When a building is classified in more than one occupancy group in accordance with the provisions of section 27-239 of article two of subchapter three of this chapter, the exit requirements for the entire building shall be determined on the basis of the occupancy group having the strictest exit requirements, or the exit requirements for each building section shall be determined separately. Travel distance within dwelling units. - In buildings classified in occupancy groups J-1 and J-2, the maximum travel distance from the centerline of a door from any habitable room within a dwelling unit either to the centerline of a door opening on a corridor or to the center of a door opening on an exit shall not be greater than forty feet, except that for buildings classified in occupancy group J-2 of construction class I-A, the distance may be increased to fifty feet. Such travel distances shall be included in the maximum travel distance established in subdivision (a) of this section. (c) Measurement. - Travel distance shall be measured along a natural and unobstructed path of travel. Where the path of travel is over an access stair, it shall be measured along an inclined straight line through the center of the outer edge of each tread. Egress from rooms and spaces. (a) There shall be at least two door openings, remote from each other and leading to exits, from every room or enclosed space in which the total occupant loads exceeds the number of persons listed in table 6-3. (c) In buildings or spaces classified in occupancy group J-2 not more than three stories and forty feet in height, occupied by not more than four families on each story and of combustible construction group II there shall be at least two door openings from each J-2 dwelling unit which shall be remote from each other. One door opening shall lead to an exit and the other to a balcony complying with subdivision (g) of section 27-369 of article five of this subchapter.

Project References and Resources

Street floor lobbies. - Street floor lobbies may be used as exit passageways when they comply with the requirements of subdivisions (a) through (g) of this section subject to the following modifications: (1) VERTICAL EXITS SERVED. - One hundred percent of the total number of vertical exits provided for a building may be served by a street floor lobby, if egress is provided in two different directions from the discharge points of all vertical exits to open exterior spaces that are remote from each other. (2)WIDTH. - Street floor lobbies serving as exit passageways shall be increased in width to accommodate the occupant load of all communicating spaces on the lobby floor that exit through them. Fire escapes. (f ) Access. - Access to fire escapes shall be by doors or windows having a minimum clear opening of twenty-four inches in width and thirty inches in height. Such doors or windows shall have a fire protection rating of three-quarters of an hour except in buildings classified in occupancy group J-2. (g) Discharge.- The top landing of fire escapes shall be provided with a stair or gooseneck ladder leading to the roof, except that this requirement shall not apply to buildings having a roof pitch of more than twenty degrees. The lowest landing of fire escapes shall be not more than sixteen feet above grade and shall be provided with a stair to grade, which may be counterbalanced. ARTICLE 10 PUBLIC GARAGES Group 2. - Buildings or spaces used exclusively for the parking of vehicles having fuel storage tanks of twenty-six gallon capacity or less, and in which no repair, body work or painting of vehicles is conducted, and in which no gasoline, oil, or similar products are dispensed. Group 2 public garages shall be classified in storage occupancy group B-2. Exits. - Public garages shall be provided with at least two exits from each tier of parking. One of the exits may be a ramp used by motor vehicles, when serving not more than one level below grade. All vertical exits shall have a

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minimum width of thirty-six inches and shall be enclosed in two hour fire-resistive construction. In group 2 public garages ***occuring in occupancy group J-2 buildings, overhead doors shall be of the automatic self-closing type. ***As enacted but â&#x20AC;&#x153;occurringâ&#x20AC;? probably intended. (a)Travel distance. -No point in any public garage shall be more than one hundred feet from an exit, except that such distance may be increased to one hundred fifty feet when the garage is fully sprinklered. Ramps. Vehicular ramps in public garages shall not exceed a gradient of one in seven, and their surfaces shall be nonslip. A landing having a minimum length of twenty feet shall be provided at the discharge point at the street level, within the street line. Ramps serving as required exits shall be enclosed in construction having a two hour fire-resistance rating except that openings for motor vehicles at each parking tier may be protected by a water curtain consisting of deluge-type sprinkler heads supplying at least three gallons of water per minute per linear foot of opening Natural light sources and location[s]* Natural light sources may face or open upon an enclosed or partially enclosed balcony or space above a setback.

Project References and Resources

Figure. Fire Separations Table per Occupany Type. Building Code of the City of New York.

The Wedding of Jane Jacobs & Le Corbusier

Figure. Area and Heigh Limitations for Unsprinklered Buildings and Spaces Table. Building Code of City of New York.

Project References and Resources

Figure. Determination of Exit and Access Requirements Table. Building Code of City of New York.

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Extractions from City of New York Parks and Recreations 1. Design A. SPACING REQUIREMENTS The following guidelines shall be observed when citing tree pits along sidewalks. These guidelines generally follow regulations of other agencies with street jurisdictions such as Fire, DOT, and MTA. These requirements are design and species dependent. The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) guidelines must be followed. a. Do not plant in front of building entrances in order to permit easy access by the Fire Department. b. Minimum distance between trees (center to center) ranges from 20’ to 30’, depending upon the tree species and other local conditions. c. Minimum distance from a streetlight is 25’ (varies with tree species). d. Minimum distance from a stop sign is 30’. e. Minimum distance from other traffic signs is 6’. f. Suggested distance from a parking meter is no more than 5’ behind the meter, to allow for the swing of car doors. g. Minimum distance from a gas or water valve is 2’ from the edge of the pit. h. Minimum distance from an oil fill pipe is 4’ from the edge of the pit. i. Minimum distance from a coal chute is 6’. j. Minimum distance from a fire hydrant is 5’ from the edge of the pit. k. Minimum distance from a curb cut or driveway is 7’. l. Minimum distance from the middle of a street intersection is 40’. 3 m. Minimum distance from the edge of the pit to any opposite obstruction (building wall, stoop, railing, etc) is from 4’ to 6’, depending upon local conditions and the amount of sidewalk traffic. n. All tree pits must be contiguous to the street curb (except as noted below, or with the permission of the Agency representative). o. Trees may be planted on either side of sidewalks (if any exist) in lawn areas where there is sufficient room between the property line and the street curb. p. Do not plant within bus stops. The locations of all trees shown on plans may be relocated as required by site and as

Project References and Resources

directed by the Agency representative. B. TREE PIT CONFIGURATION Tree pits should be as large as possible to allow for ample growing space for tree roots and crown. Optimal tree pit size would be 4 feet by 10 feet or 5 feet by 10 feet. The overall width of a sidewalk can limit the size of a tree pit. Please refer to the Sample Tree Pit Configuration Sheet on page 23 for a range of possible tree pit sizes. Parks encourages continuous tree pits whenever possible, and designs that call for continuous pits may be given more flexible spacing requirements by the Agency representative. Tree pits shall be continuous wherever group plantings are involved (see below) D. SPECIES SELECTION Growing conditions and microclimates can vary from location to location within a borough and across the City. Final tree variety selection is determined by site conditions 4 and design goals, and a New York City Parks and Recreation Representative. In choosing a tree, the mature height and spread shall be considered to ensure that it will not interfere with existing or proposed structures and overhead utilities. Parks will not allow large and medium trees to be planted under overhead wires. The species characteristics shall be considered to ensure that they will not cause interference with walls, walks, drives, and other paved surfaces, or affect water and sewer lines or underground drainage systems. See the attached list of approved street trees for New York City for information on each species shape, growth rate, visual interest, environmental tolerances and sensitivities (including Asian Longhorned beetle hosts), and special needs.

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Figure. Section Illustration of tree planting & stake detail. City of New York Parks & Recreation.

Project References and Resources

Figure. Sample Tree Pit Configurations Table. City of New York Parks & Recreations.

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Extractions from Fire Code of New York State Fire Code of New York State Appendix D Fire Apparatus Access Roads SECTION D102 REQUIRED ACCESS D102.1 Access and loading. Facilities, buildings or portions of buildings hereafter constructed shall be accessible to fire department apparatus by way of an approved fire apparatus access road with an asphalt, concrete or other approved driving surface capable of supporting the imposed load of fire apparatus weighing at least 75,000 pounds (34 050 kg). SECTION D103 MINIMUM SPECIFICATIONS D103.1 Access road width with a hydrant. Where a fire hydrant is located on a fire apparatus access road, the minimum road width shall be 26 feet (7925 mm). See Figure D103.1. D103.2 Grade. Fire apparatus access roads shall not exceed 10 percent in grade. Exception: Grades steeper than 10 percent as approved by the fire chief. D103.3 Turning radius. The minimum turning radius shall be determined by the code enforcement official. D103.4 Dead ends. Dead-end fire apparatus access roads in excess of 150 feet (45 720 mm) shall be provided with width and turnaround provisions in accordance with Table D103.4. D105.2 Width. Fire apparatus access roads shall have a minimum unobstructed width of 26 feet (7925 mm) in the immediate vicinity of any building or portion of building more than 30 feet (9144 mm) in height. D105.3 Proximity to building. At least one of the required access routes meeting this condition shall be located within a minimum of 15 feet (4572 mm) and a maximum of 30 feet (9144 mm) from the building, and shall be positioned parallel to one entire side of the building.

Project References and Resources

Extractions from Zoning Code of the City of New York Height Factor* The height factor of a building is equal to the total floor area of the building divided by its lot coverage (in square feet). In general, the height factor is equal to the number of stories in a building constructed without setbacks. Open Space Ratio (OSR)* The open space ratio is the amount of open space required on a residential zoning lot in non-contextual districts, expressed as a percentage of the total floor area on the zoning lot. For example, if a building with 20,000 square feet of floor area has an OSR of 20, 4,000 square feet of open space would be required on the zoning lot (0.20 × 20,000 sq ft). In R7-1 districts, off-street parking is required for 60% of the dwelling units, and can be waived if five or fewer spaces are required. In R7-2 districts, off-street parking is required for 50% of the units, and can be waived if 15 or fewer spaces are required. The optional Quality Housing regulations for buildings on wide streets outside the Manhattan Core are the same as in R7A districts. The maximum FAR is 4.0 and the base height before setback is 40 to 65 feet with a maximum building height of 80 feet. The maximum FAR on narrow streets and within the Manhattan Core is 3.44, and the base height before setback is 40 to 60 feet with a maximum building height of 75 feet. The area between a building’s street wall and the street line must be planted, and the building must have interior amenities for residents pursuant to the Quality Housing Program. Off-street parking is required for 50% of all dwelling units. The floor area ratio (FAR) in R7A districts is 4.0. Above a base height of 40 to 65 feet, the building must set back to a depth of 10 feet on a wide street and 15 feet on a narrow street before rising to a maximum height of 80 feet. In order to preserve the traditional streetscape, the street wall of a new building can be no closer to the street line, than any building within 150 feet on the same block, but need not be farther than 15 feet. Buildings must have interior amenities for the residents pursuant to the Quality Hous-

The Wedding of Jane Jacobs & Le Corbusier

ing Program. Off-street parking is not allowed in front of a building. Parking is required for 50% of all dwelling units. Density Density refers to the maximum number of dwelling units permitted on a zoning lot. The factors for each district are approximations of average unit size plus allowances for any common areas. Special density regulations apply to mixed buildings that contain both residential and community facility uses. Incentive Zoning* Incentive zoning provides a bonus, usually in the form of additional floor area, in exchange for the provision of a public amenity or affordable housing. There are incentive bonuses for the provision of public plazas (privately owned public spaces), visual or performing arts spaces, subway improvements, theater preservation, FRESH food stores and affordable housing (Inclusionary Housing Program). FRESH Food Store* A FRESH food store is a full-line grocery store, established in underserved neighborhoods through zoning incentives, that promotes the sale of fresh food products. Mixed Building* A mixed building is a building in a commercial district used partly for residential use and partly for community facility or commercial use. When a building contains more than one use, the maxi-mum FAR permitted on the zoning lot is the highest FAR allowed for any of the uses, provided that the FAR for each use does not exceed the maximum FAR permitted for that use. In a C1-8A district, for example, where the maximum commercial FAR is 2.0 and the maximum residential FAR is 7.52, the total permitted FAR for a mixed residential/commercial building would be 7.52, of which no more than 2.0 FAR may be applied to the commercial space. Predominantly Built-up Area* A predominantly built-up area is a blockfront entirely within an R4 or R5 district (without

Project References and Resources

a suffix) in which optional regulations that permit higher floor area ratios and lower parking requirements may be used to produce infill housing. At least 50 percent of the area of the block must be occupied by zoning lots developed with buildings, and the zoning lot that will be developed with infill housing may not exceed 1.5 acres (65,340 sq ft). Infill regulations may not be used to redevelop a lot occupied by a one- or two-family detached or semi-detached house unless the blockfront is predominantly developed with attached or multifamily housing. Quality Housing Program The Quality Housing Program, mandatory in contextual R6 through R10 residence districts and optional in non- contextual R6 through R10 districts, encourages development consistent with the character of many established neighborhoods. Its bulk regulations set height limits and allow high lot coverage buildings that are set at or near the street line. The Quality Housing Program also requires amenities relating to interior space, recreation areas and landscaping. Street* A street is any road (other than a private road), highway, parkway, avenue, alley or other way shown on the City Map, or a way at least 50 feet wide and intended for public use which connects a way shown on the City Map to another such way or to a building or structure. A street refers to the entire public right-of-way (including public sidewalks). A narrow street* is a street that is less than 75 feet wide. A wide street* is a street that is 75 feet or more in width. Most bulk regulations applicable to wide streets are also applicable to buildings on intersecting streets within 100 feet of a wide street.

The Wedding of Jane Jacobs & Le Corbusier

Project References and Resources

Figure. 2011 Zoning Map 12c. New York City Planning Commission. Zoning Code of City of New York.

The Wedding of Jane Jacobs & Le Corbusier

R7 Residential Occupancy Type (Manhattan) Building lots on the westside of Avenue A on the site are zoned R7 allowing mixed-use spaces, typicaly at grade, in addition to residential occupancy.

Figure. R7 Illustration and Quality Housing Table. Zoning Code of City of New York.

Project References and Resources

R7A Residential Occupancy Type Entire block besides building lots adjacent to Avenue Aâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s westside are zoned R7A.

Figure. R7A Illustration and General Residence District Table. Zoning Code of City of New York.

Precedents

Precedents Block and Infill

Housing

Facade

Fünf Höfe Marcus Garvey Housing Elliott-Chelsea Proposal Neder-over-heembeek Quartier Schützenstrasse Las Delicias Frozen Street

78 79 80 81 84 85 83

Northpoint Frozen Street Ypenburg

82 83 86

Ypenburg Fünf Höfe Quartier Schützenstrasse

86 78 84

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Fünf Höfe, Herzog & De Meuron, Munich Fünf Höfe is a mixed-use infill project within a block of the old city quartiers of Munich. It has five entries creating public passageways through the block lined with commercial spaces, courtyards, and arcades. Private program on the upper floors consisting of residential and office spaces are accessible from the interior of the block. While most of the buildings and facades along the street were preserved, the entry facade to the right was new construction. Herzog & De Meuron created the idea for the ‘Five Courts’ as a contemporary rendition of historic interior court residences.

Images from top to bottom: Perforated screen facade at Perusahof passage entry. Courtyard and passageways in the interior of the block highlighted. New housing on upper levels visible from interior of block. Preservation of an existing facade at Prannerpassage.

Precedents

Marcus Garvey Housing, Kenneth Frampton, Brooklyn As this project was a part of the Museum of Modern Artâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s exhibition Another chance at housing, the team designed low-rise high density prototypical unit as lowrise housing alternatives. The prototypical single block layout anticipated development of varied heights with higher structures along the avenues and low-rise high density development restricted to the cross streets. The design called for units that face the street as well as mew unit on the interior of the block accessible through passageways cutting through the interior of the block. Both unit types have stoops as a result of the units sunk 4â&#x20AC;&#x2122; into the ground.

Another chance for housing: low-rise alternatives; Brownsville, Brooklyn, Fox Hills, Staten Island, (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1973), 14-20.

The Wedding of Jane Jacobs & Le Corbusier

Elliott-Chelsea Proposal, Lawrence Halpern, Manhattan A low-rise infill project was proposed in 1968 for the Elliott-Chelsea housing then Penn Station South. As an alternative to the tower-in-the-park “the proposal suggested building new low, continuous structures in the ‘parkland’ which would reestablish human-scale spaces and reintegrate the towers with the surrounding urban fabric,” (Plunz 1990, 292). The project was commissioned by the Housing and Development Administration(HDA) as a study “to attempt to correct some of the design problems of the previous generation of social housing.” Design proposals that came out of the HDA “evolved toward a vision of the high-rise tower as an eroded form which could be more readily integrated with lower building.” It became a project for the reproposal of the tower-in-the-park typology.

Richard Plunz, A History of Housing in New York City, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), 293.

Precedents

Neder-over-heembeek, Office dA, Belgium The idea for the project was to redefine the edge of the street proposing to extend the retail spaces at its base to produce human activity. The project is a proposed housing block making the street carve out of it. A pair of row houses at the streetâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s edge raised from grade to all for public access through to the interior of the block. While the typical housing block is generally defined by four separate legs, the entire housing program is conceived as one building organized as a bar building that is folded five times establishing relationship with the neighboring context.

The Wedding of Jane Jacobs & Le Corbusier

Northpoint, Office dA, Cambridge, MA Dealing with the modern metropolis, the idea was to create a human scale as it relates to the domestic scale. In doing so, the project proposed an invention of housing program that icludes four housing typologies that are stacked on top of each other to create a new hybrid: loft/work-live spaces at street and plinth level, row house duplex types with stoops and gardens at street and plinth level, ny style walk-ups on the second floor, and double-loaded corridor apartments at upper levels. In section, each housing type has its own access and circulation.

Precedents

Frozen Street, Onat Öktem and Ziya Imren, Moscow The main idea of the design was to compose an urban block with variants of modules, which characterize the urban block with their solid/void pattern and spatial typology. The variation and combination of the modules within the spatial configuration of the overlying structural framing system create certain levels of porosity along the block’s edge. The combination of the modules offers a various possibilities of module configuration. Therefore the system can be used in different sites and for various programs. The diversity of the modules allows flexibility of use. The ground floor is programmed for public use and not reserved for only the resident. There is no parking on the street and the commercial spaces on at grade a left transparent.

Jordana , Sebastian, A101 Urban Block Competition proposal / Onat Öktem and Ziya Imren, 15 Jan 2011, ArchDaily,<http://www.archdaily.com/103720>

The Wedding of Jane Jacobs & Le Corbusier

Quartier SchĂźtzenstrasse, Aldo Rossi, Berlin While the facade of this housing block is eye-catching, it is method used to configure the facade that defines the project. Aldo Rossi uses the historical urban structure of the division of land into small plots which in turn, results in the appearance of individualized buildings on individual plots. However, the total number of facades exceeds the number of houses standing independently of one another. Most of the buildings are mixed-use, residential and commercial. The plan, inspired by building blocks of 19th century Berlin, is organized around two large and two small interior courtyards. The colors of the facade are very vivid. Yet in Rossiâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s concept for the facade, he references antiquity. The more vibrant the color, the more artificial the building facade material used. Rossi designs a city-within-a-city based on individual lot structure design.

Precedents

Las Delicias, MVRDV, Malaga Free-standing massings are stacked on top of one another forming a cluster of student and family housing mixed with cultural program. Public routes run through and over the site leading to public areas which are located at higher levels. The Spanish courtyard is pulled inside out. The 0 level street system or activated ground level is exploited to maximize urban life in the city of Malaga.

The Wedding of Jane Jacobs & Le Corbusier

Ypenburg, West 8, Den Haag, Netherlands As a part of their urban design work, many of their urban design residential projects deal with the issue of facade. Facade variation is a key theme. As seen in the New Jenfield project for the city of Hamburg, variation studies of brick facades were employed. In the Ypenburg project in Den Haag, Netherlands, the plan was divided into different feilds each with its own architectural and urban development properties. Each plan consists of 500 to 800 dwellings. The voids of the project are a park space, a public garden, and the boulevard. Each dwelling is situated on one of these elements creating an open space development. To create an urban identity in the plan, a mix of housing types with differences in height was employed.

Figures 1,2,3. Axonometric program diagrams. Grey represent existing towers, purple added residential, yellow added instiutional, and red added retail.

The Wedding of Jane Jacobs & Le Corbusier

Project: The Wedding of the Village View & the East Village The goal, bringing back diversity to the site in the form of building type, user, and program, adding density, redefining the edge of the block, and reactivating the streetscape, mainfested in the form of a mixed-use residential block. Program was reintroduced to the edge of the site - commercial and residential. The interior of the site remained park space, and an institutional program was added. By increasing the density and diversifying the user from the lower to moderate income families of the Mitchel Llama residential towers, a goal was to have the opportunity for the streets and interior of the site to be activated and well used. An important part of that activation dealt with the relationship of the property line and the street. Having buildings front the street and programmed space at the streets edge provides for that communication that was not there as existing. In keeping with what was lost programmatically, physically, and spatially, the facades were designed keeping with this language with what was lost. Wall openings and building mass from 1940â&#x20AC;&#x2122;s tax information was used to redefine the new facades along the streets. The issue of privacy and sunlight defined most of the facade choices such as material being opaque or transparent, as well as the use of screens, and the push and pull or angling of certain exterior walls. A few different units types were implemented on the site from apartments to townhouses to duplexes ranging in size and number of bedrooms. It was important to maintain the units existing on the site from the original towers, and in stitching together low-rise building mass with the towers, some of those units at the lower levels were excised. However, there was a great overall net gain of units and population. An atrium space stitches together the two building masses, low-rise and high-rise, in the Tower Type A scenario, connecting the spaces physically, spatially, and visually.

The Wedding

Figure 4. Sectional perspective through East 4th Street looking East

Figure 5. Site Plan at Grade

The Wedding of Jane Jacobs & Le Corbusier

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Figure 6. Upper Level Site Plan

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Figure 7. Tower Type A Floor Plan at Grade (SouthEast Plan)

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Figure 8. Tower Type A Upper Level Floor Plan (Southeast Tower)

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Figures 9,10. Axonometric diagrams of existing and new circulation cores above, and unit types below. Red represents mixed-use type, green represents townhouse type, purple represents apartment type, and yellow represents live-work hybrid type.

The Wedding

Figures 11,12,13. Unit type plans from left to right on spread. Townhouse and live-work hybrid typical, apartment types in mixed-use, and apartment building types.

East 6th Street Southside

East 4th Street Northside

The Wedding of Jane Jacobs & Le Corbusier

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Avenue A Westside

Figure 14. Elevation studies. Figure ground of openings versus wall. 1st Avenue Eastside

Figure 15. Cross Section through Southeast Tower

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Figure 16. Cut-away axonometric

100

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101

Figure 17. Corner Perspective at 1st Avenue and East 4th Street

102

Figure 18. Closed facades along East 4th Street

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103

Figure 19. Open facades along East 4th Street

104

Figure 20. Rendering of exterior court in interior of site

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105

Figures 20,21,22,23. Shadow and sun studies of proposed building masses at equinoxes and solstices.

106

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Figure 24. Corner of East 4th Street and 1st Avenue (model shows wall openings, building mass, and placement or angling of wall). Built Scale: 1â&#x20AC;&#x2122; = 1/64â&#x20AC;?

The Wedding

Figure 25. East 6th Street looking East

107

Figure 26. East 5th Street pedestrian corridor

Figure 27. East 4th Street

Figure 28. Physical model showing site and intervention

108

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Addendum: Ideas Found in Practice Post-Defense

In New York City, there is currently a proposal making its way through city planning approvals that may affect the open spaces of residential tower developments in Harlem and East New York, mainly the Lower East Side of Manhattan. The New York City Housing Authority is looking for ways to generate revenue for the city and has proposed a plan that would allow private developers to lease unbuilt land for projects such as apartments, commercial, and retail space. The towers would not be demolished and residents would remain. The land up for potential lease would include parks, courtyards, parking lots, playgrounds and other property on the grounds. Some of the sites in question are along the East River waterfront where many of the housing projects reside including the Alfred E. Smith Houses, Baruch Houses, Campos Plaza, Fiorello LaGuardia and Meltzer Tower in Lower Manhattan.

Figure 1 left. Chen, David W. “Housing Authority Leader Offers Plan to Raise Money.” The New York Times. Sept 24 2012. Accessed Apr 10 2013 < http:// www.nytimes.com/2012/09/25/nyregion/housingauthority-chairman-offers-money-raising-plan. html> Figure 2 right. Navarro, Mireya. “Tenants Worried by Plans to Build Near City Projects.” The New York Times. Mar 11 2013. Accessed Mar 11 2013 < http:// www.nytimes.com/2013/03/12/nyregion/plan-tolease-open-land-at-housing-projects-stirs-concern. html?smid=pl-share>

Housing Authority Chairman Offers Money-Raising Plan - NYTimes.com

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