MIRANDA SHUGARS

This portfolio traces the progression of my ideas about architecture during a three year Master of Architecture program at Columbia University, Without

Toilet and Bathhouse

Critic: Jeffrey Johnson

Semester: FA2014

Site: Strauss Park and W 132nd Street, New York City

Size: 400 SF and 20,000 SF

Program: public bathroom and gym / bathhouse

How can architecture provide emotional relief from the city’s ood of sensorial experience?

Two publicly accessible water infrastructures for New York City o er havens from the hustle and noise by a gradual, processional remove into architecture.

The rst, a toilet, sits where West End Avenue splits from Broadway, at a small triangular park made in memory of the Titanic’s victims. The toilet takes the shape, from above, of a hurricane, with two arms that reach into the park, pulling the viewers into a sunken, concrete-walled cylinder. The structure has no straight surfaces; a choir of unnecessary pipes arc over the concrete shell, forming a tight dome that carries water and preserves the thermal inspirations of concrete, while visually foregrounding the mechanism of a bathroom’s function – its metal guts, usually shut away in walls.

It would happen like this: you’re walking south on Broadway, past familiar storefronts – the Manchester Diner, Absolute Bagel, the Garden of Eden grocery – Martin Brother’s liquor store and The West End Lounge jazz club across the street – no food stands or newsstands on this block, packed side-to-side with fast-stepping young women in yoga pants, impatient mothers and children they’ve given scooters for speed or entertainment or both, men in suits with ne, shiny shoes walking close to the storefront glass to avoid ranging children, an old woman in a dirty sweatsuit shaking a cup outside the grocery store’s exit, a man sprawled half on the subway grate, half against a bike stand, to which the owner inside an ATM has tied a shaking miniature collie – the sidewalk itself a tricky tapestry of wet gum, discarded wrappers, skittering papers, dark and ancient stains, various puddles, under a miasma of tra c fumes and fresh bread and human sweat – beneath the old, towering yellow brick apartments with prominent setbacks growing over with trees and other plants, green leaving hanging clean and far above the sidewalk. In the endless roar of tra c a retruck creeps painfully up Broadway, passing you with the slowest and closest Doppler shift you’ve ever heard.

You cross the street to the small park, which is green and full of squirrels and blooming plants, and people sleeping on benches or eating lunch. You pass the benches and make your way to what looks like a short concrete silo, to the left of the main bath and sunken into the ground, with colorfully painted metal pipes leaping over it like sh. You walk along a thin concrete arm that gradually rises above you, as it slopes taller and your path slopes downward. You pass under the pipes and down a gently curving walkway that takes you into the center of the silo, where chrome xtures project from the wall. Sunlight lters through glass between the pipes, re ecting their color and scattering blue and silver akes through the space to complement the warm downlighting along the walls. Two teardrop-shaped stalls occupy the center of the spiralling bathroom. By now the sounds from outside have receded to a quiet hum. Behind you, someone ushes a toilet; the pipes overhead resonate with gushing water. The public bathroom is a small oasis in the sensory assault that can be New York.

The second building, a bathhouse, occupies a small lot in the wasteland between 125th Harlem and 135th City College, across the street from Columbia’s new campus (which didn’t exist at the time of conception) – a wasteland of garages, car repair shops, parking lots, and gas stations, pharmacies and bodegas. The immediate block around the bathhouse’s lot has been car-related industry since at least the 1980s.

Like the contentious gym proposed by Columbia in the 1960s for Morningside Park, this 132rd-street bathhouse would also have two entrances and serve two populations: the students and faculty of Columbia and the residents of West Harlem. The e ectively segregated Morningside gym project consisted of a building that would span Columbia’s higher ground to Harlem’s low ground, with separate and unequal facilities for the two populations. The project was so violently opposed by both student groups and Harlem groups like ARCH, culminating in organized protests and heated planning debates in 1968, that Columbia eventually gave up on building anything there.

The 132nd-street bathhouse contains back and front entrances as well, but its 20,000 SF facility is undivided. Public park occupies most of its site – a rock garden play area to the east, and long re ecting pools with benches and trees to the west. Walls with open entrances surround the parks with a variety of slopes and angles, echoing the singly-sloped roof of the building itself. The bathhouse’s shed roof is made of concrete right angles, so that its entirety is stair-like and occupiable for running, walking, or sitting. A curtain wall of stained glass hangs from the west-facing facade, which is the building’s only entrance and exit – regardless of the angle of arrival, bathhouse patrons must enter from the west, through the stained-glass facade. Underground, the main pool is naturally lit by slats in the oor behind the facade, through which colored light is cast.