GSAPP Graduating Portfolio, 2018, part 2

Year 2: Society and Placeness

Core of Housing

Criticic: : Eric Bunge

Part r ner: r: E Eric Li L

Sememest s er: : FA2015

Sitete: : Mott tt Haven, Brononx, x, N New York City

Size: : 330,000 SF

Program: m: h housing

Model of three housing buildings with outdoor “streets” that allow visual connection to each other and to neighborhood. >

In NYC, you either have a balcony or you have a stoop— there are no porches here. New York is a porch-parched city. Real estate is simply too valuable to extend the threshold between your home and your neighborhood— your street, your million-fold city— much more than the horizontal distance required to vertically reach the sidewalk.

Stoops, elements of necessity, have developed an important life in the city as sites of clandestine urban interaction. The stoop begs a slower gait, apart from the impatient traversing of sidewalks. Stoops are not porches, but something more accessible. They do not invite visitors with a yawning wideness, they do not say come up for a cool drink and conversation; and so they do not turn strangers away. A vital trait in a city of strangers.

However, the stoop’s era has passed. Though their forebears remain sites of vibrant interaction and action throughout the city, the “stoops” of newer housing projects either lack this welcoming indi erence or forego the public space entirely.

Plateaus of visual and spatial interaction between residents of a neighborhood or city, and those who do not inhabit the surrounding area but are visiting or traveling. Like the porch or stoop, a place of mixing, on a larger scale.

> Three types of stoops - small residential (true stoop), high-rise residential (isolated stoop), and new proposed hybrid.

Sprefeld’s infrastructure can be de ned two ways:

1) the buildings’ “core” - its steel, stairs, chutes and frames;

2) its copious mapped “option spaces” - large unprogrammed rooms left to the residents’ evolving needs and wants.

Sprefeld: cloudy and about to rain, set beside the Spre River in Berlin. Sprefeld is a Baugrupen (SP), a collectively-owned housing development model favored in Germany.

> BLACK indicates chases (for water and for trash) in Sprefeld’s three buildings; meanwhile, the common spaces are drawn as wall-less.

> Ground oors of Sprefeld’s three buildings, highlighting various activities that can occur: an art gallery, a martial arts class, a gym, a student tour...

Sprefeld’s buildings.

> Street wraps building - external circulation.

>

“shared”, communal spaces like laundry, and childcare.

and storage.

> Element 1: “porch”, circulation.

Element 2:

> Element 3: “core”, bedroom, bathroom,

Two Bedroom (Private)

larger families

2 units per cluster

733 sq. ft. core/unit

32 units

Two Bedroom (Public)

smaller families

2 units per cluster

503 sq. ft. core/unit

64 units

ADA Cluster

ADA, elderly

2 units per cluster

239 sq. ft. core/unit

32 units

Studio Cluster students, couples

4 units per cluster

207 sq. ft. core/unit

128 units

> Four unit types designed, based on Mott Haven’s existing and projected demographics, for the elderly, single-parent or two-parent families, and students or other young, transient populations. To reduce costs and material needs, each unit comes with built-in furniture - beds, shelving, some seating.

Apartments open themselves and integrate domestic life with commercial life, fostering community by remaining semi-public rather than sequestering their residents in locked rooms o of dark interior hallways. The spaces of the apartment range from commercially public towers, to shared communal gardens and amenities, to shared private kitchens and living rooms, to the “core” private bedrooms and bathrooms.

New York apartments have changed over time, becoming more standardized in terms of room size and layout. As minimal room size regulations have become stricter, rent on a ordable as well as luxury units has skyrocketed exponentially.

As an alternative model, the Sprefeld apartments in

Berlin allocate copious room to “option spaces”, whose programs are determined by resident agreement.

The Mott Haven neighborhood has a high concentration of single-parent households, as well as student populations attracted by nearby colleges. To serve the area, the Core of Housing apartment complex is designed to minimize rent costs and maximize community engagement.

The units for the Core of Housing apartments shrink the private “core” spaces, while allocating more space to communal amenities. By pooling square footage requirements, the apartments keep rent low.

Central Park Labyrinth

Critic: Karla

Rothstein

Semester: SP2016

Site: Central Park Reservoir, New York

City

Size: 103 acres

Program: cemetery and urban farm

existing running path extended labyrinthnon-directed wandering entrance pointspurposeful direction

path of dead paths of living

> RED marks the path of the dead through the Central Park Labyrinth, into the central pool.

> YELLOW marks the path of the farmers through the Central Park Labyrinth; PURPLE marks the fourteen-mile path of runners or walkers. You can, of course, short-cut this path by countless perpendicular routes.

underground access road

central pool

disposition cavities

parking lot

memorial garden low crops

chapel interior

central procession

> Horizontal cut reveals interior and low spaces related to funerary services and memorial.

> Siting shows relative ground heights, with white as highest; and oculi above chapel and outreach spaces.

250ft125ft 50ft

150ft 75ft 30ft

The life cycle of New York City: juvenile o ender in the morning, community outreach leader in the afternoon, Central Park resident in the evening, tomorrow’s juveniles by morning.

The Labyrinth keeps this cycle.

The Labyrinth is a cemetery and a garden.

New York City residents return to their city - they become the hydrangeas, the sycamores and ginkgos, the organic tomatoes, the onions and brussels sprouts, the alfalfa and sun owers. They nourish New York City’s lung, Central Park. They feed the pigeons and sparrows, the squirrels and feral cats, the leashed dogs and families stacked in their towers, the brokers in their o ces, the displaced persons in shelters, the children and adolescents struggling to de ne their roles in the city.

> Central Park Labyrinth siting in spring, on a blue sky day with prominent cumulus clouds. Each crop has its own hatch; for instance, owers are dots, lettuce is hatch, tomatoes are oblongs, etc. See crop diagram for more detail.

The grounds themselves are organized as a labyrinth which gently descends along its path, enabling a gravity-driven irrigation system as well as a long, curving walkway for meditative re ection. The labyrinth has many entrances, exits, and shortcuts, but for the ambitious runner it adds 8.6 miles to the existing 2-mile track. You descend into the labyrinth down a series of steep, tree-lined paths that obscure the expanse of the inner spiral from the outside roads. As you emerge on the lip of the site, you see the arcing farmlands of the vocational youth outreach center, layers of green or orange, red, or yellow, depending on the season. You catch glimpses of the large circular pool that sits at the center of the labyrinth, quietly dissolving two hundred and fty six bodies into fertilizer.

> Looking across the labyrinth, spring.

The pool feeds through a series of canals, running backwards down the length of the inhabited arm of interior space, through chapels, classrooms, and hallways. Smaller streams snake o to feed vertical moss walls, and horizontal winter growth troughs. The spaces of youth outreach and funerary rites eat into each other like rust into metal, blurring the divisions between age, status, occupation, and activity.

cucumber

melon

squash

gourds

onion

garlic

leek

lettuce

sun owers

carrot

celery

parsnips

corn

wheat

oats

rye

spinach

beets

chard

cabbage

broccoli

brussels

sprouts

kale

peas

beans

tomatoes

peppers

eggplant

potatoes

> Crop diagram. Crops rotate seasonally to refresh soil, and are placed according to light and nutrient requirements.

This re-formed cemetery, where physical divisions are allowed to dissolve, also begins to dissolve social divisions. North of Manhattan is Hart Island, the largest publicly-funded cemetery in the world. Hart Island’s mass trenches accept those unwanted, unclaimed, or unable to a ord a cemetery plot, and its custodians are the inmates from nearby

Riker’s Island prison: New York’s unwanted burying the unwanted in an unseen place. The re-formed cemetery inverts the model of Hart Island by o ering at-risk youth the opportunity for ownership of sacred space, for vocational horticultural training as part of a comprehensive alternative to juvenile detention or punishment, positioning the youth as caretakers and benefactors of the land.

> Central re ecting pool, winter.

Interlude

2 : Love and Fish