Chapter 1 | Sanctuary and the City
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Portfolio: Columbia GSAPP 2018
> Artichoke color shifts as it ages left to right.
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Chapter 1 | Sanctuary and the City
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> Artichoke color shifts as it ages left to right.
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Introduction
This portfolio traces the progression of my ideas about architecture during a three year Master of Architecture program at Columbia University, Without prior exposure to the field, I spent my first year grappling with tectonic and phenomenological issues of design in New York City, as well as the potential of student work as narrative allegory. During my second year I struggled with the place of architecture to effect social and political change, first in housing and then in public development. My third year projects posited material-scale inventions to address deep issues of cultural memory, heritage, and future. Each project begins with a collage of relevant notes and concept sketches, and an interlude follows each year, situating the work in its wider visual texture and connecting to my background in studio art, which has always fundamentally informed my understanding of architecture.
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Contents
Year 1:
9
Sanctuary and the City
Interlude 1:
32
Travel
Year 2:
36
Society and Placeness
Interlude 2:
66
Love and Fish
Year 3:
70
Memory and Inheritance
Interlude 3:
108
Dreaming
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Year 1: Sanctuary and the City
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Toilet and Bathhouse
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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 offer 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.
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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 traffic 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 traffic a retruck creeps painfully up Broadway, passing you with the slowest and closest Doppler shift you’ve ever heard. > New York City, Strauss Park site plan.
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> Plan / section overlay of curving public bathroom.
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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
> Plan perspective of bathroom as meditative space.
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xtures project from the wall. Sunlight lters through glass between the pipes, reecting 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.
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> Section perspective of bathroom as oasis.
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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.
> Plan of bathhouse.
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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 effectively 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.
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> Floor plans of bathhouse.
> Procession through bathhouse spaces.
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> Interior view of pool area, underground.
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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 reecting 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.
> Bathhouse as cathedral-like space of remove from city.
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> Model photos of bathhouse
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Human Bank
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Critic: Erica Goetz Semester: SP2015 Site: Long Island City, Queens, New York City Size: 60,000 SF Program: bank and zombie shelter
How can architecture school projects have real effects? Can architecture function allegorically? Since the advent of the bank, a secure and opaque house of valuables, money has become increasingly symbolic. You don’t see piles of money in most people’s houses, but you see their possessions, their grooming, the way they carry themselves, and you understand that in a bank somewhere they have a corresponding numeric value. Money, those numbers in servers, is no less central to the way we dene ourselves and each other. We have bred a consumer culture in which the value of human life is determined by a series of bits and bytes, often abstracted from their meaning as commodity value. We hoard these numbers in banks, and securely build our image on the basis of an idea of wealth.
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Once upon a time in Long Island City a valuable young investor commissioned a hungry young designer to build a bank. This bank would be a symbol of wealth and strength, opaque and fortress-like outside, with the lush cavity of scal belonging within. The bank would be a geode, the bank would be a cloister for the love and worship of immaterial wealth, or an electro-numerical god. The gentrifying populous would experience this modern value system – sleek ,beautiful, and digital. The building would be an experiential manifestation of high net worth – of self worth. In this moment the end was already determined. The new bank ourished and grew, employees and customers enjoying exchanges of bytes and titles and satisfaction and security – opulence hoarded and hollowly at rest in ones and zeros. The bank's commodities were consumerism itself – and consume and consume they did, until the bio-cultural shifts bore in a new meaning for the word. The outbreak of an unforeseen consequence bred a new generation of self-immolating capitalists, and the fuel of electronic worth, the esh and corporeal brain, became consumable commodity. Gradually the burden of scal worth dwindled, and those people who yet survived the changes inhabited the bank in a new way. The building was a fortress, a haven, a cloister. It became a vault for precious vitality, a human bank. Sketch of protective thickened wall concept with interior courtyard garden and roof gardens, and semipermeable exterior walls with circulation. >
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> Exploded axonometric of bank.
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In the allegory of a Human Bank, a building that represents our monetary culture is built, experiences a period of moderate success, and then falls to a zombie apocalypse. Zombies are, after all, the ultimate self-destructive consumers. In light of this new threat, surviving humans take refuge in the bank — now human bank, now devoid of monetary responsibility. The bank’s advertised business becomes its real function: protecting people’s life
> Site plan, section, and perspective.
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> Program diagram.
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The zombie bank references traditional ideals of visual opacity in banks — thick, impenetrable walls — to reinforce the symbolic association with solidity and security. Inside, the customer is greeted by the bank’s commodity: its image: clean, white walls, open, green spaces. The space feels professional and modern, but welcoming and open at the same time. The work environment is pleasant and friendly, and even the employees are sold on this image of the bank’s humanity — while in reality it is in the business of quantifying human value mechanically
> Floor plans
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Section of bank across time: ďƒžrst, on left, as presentday bank, then moving right as zombies attack, and on the far right the building is repurposed as a safe haven for New York’s remaining humans. >
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In contrast, after the apocalypse, the building becomes a true oasis. The ornamental features — the gardens and rain water system that feed them, the opaque walls — become the most necessary and functional parts of the building. The interiority allows for communication and observation, the walls keep the zombies at bay.
> Interior view of post-apocalyptic bank.
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Interlude 1 : Travel
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Chapter 2 | Society and Placeness
Year 2: Society and Placeness
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Core of Housing
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Critic Critic: Crit ic: : Er Eric ic B Bun Bunge unge ge Partner: Part Pa rtne ner: r: E Eri Eric ric c Li Semester: Seme Se mest ster er: : FA FA20 FA2015 2015 15 Site: Site: Site : Mott Mott Haven, H Hav aven en, , Bronx, Bron Br onx, x, New New York Y Yor ork k Ci City ty Size: Size Si ze: : 33 330, 330,000 0,00 000 0 SF Program: Prog Pr ogra ram: m: h hou housing ousi sing ng
“Cities have a syntax that is not apparent from above.” - Eyal Weizman
Model of three housing buildings with outdoor “streets” that allow visual connection to each other and to neighborhood. >
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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.
> Three types of stoops - small residential (true stoop), high-rise residential (isolated stoop), and new proposed hybrid.
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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 indifference 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.
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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.
Sprefeld’s infrastructure can be dened 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. 44 | 35
> BLACK indicates chases (for water and for trash) in Sprefeld’s three buildings; meanwhile, the common spaces are drawn as wall-less.
Shugars | GSAPP 2018 > Reference axonometric of Sprefeld’s buildings.
> 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...
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> Element 1: “porch”, circulation.
> Element 2: “shared”, communal spaces like laundry, and childcare.
> Street wraps building - external circulation.
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> Element 3: “core”, bedroom, bathroom, and storage.
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Two Bedroom (Private)
Two Bedroom (Public)
larger families
smaller families
2 units per cluster 733 sq. ft. core/unit
2 units per cluster 503 sq. ft. core/unit
32 units
64 units
ADA Cluster
Studio Cluster
ADA, elderly
students, couples
2 units per cluster 239 sq. ft. core/unit
4 units per cluster 207 sq. ft. core/unit
32 units
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.
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Apartments open themselves and integrate domestic life with commercial life, fostering community by remaining semi-public rather than sequestering their residents in locked rooms off 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 affordable as well as luxury units has skyrocketed exponentially.
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.
As an alternative model, the Sprefeld apartments in
> Floor plans
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Central Park Labyrinth
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Critic: Karla Rothstein Semester: SP2016 Site: Central Park Reservoir, New York City Size: 103 acres Program: cemetery and urban farm
existing running path > 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.
> RED marks the path of the dead through the Central Park Labyrinth, into the central pool.
extended labyrinth non-directed wandering entrance points purposeful direction
path of dead paths of living
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underground access road central pool disposition cavities parking lot memorial garden low crops chapel interior central procession
150ft
> Horizontal cut reveals interior and low spaces related to funerary services and memorial.
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75ft 30ft
250ft 125ft 50ft
> Siting shows relative ground heights, with white as highest; and oculi above chapel and outreach spaces.
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97th Street Transverse (existing)
The life cycle of New York City: juvenile offender in the morning, community outreach leader in the afternoon, Central Park resident in the evening, tomorrow’s juveniles by morning. access road central pool disposition cavities
The Labyrinth keeps this cycle.
youth outreach center medium ground
memorial garden
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 sunowers. 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 offices, the displaced persons in shelters, the children and adolescents struggling to dene their roles in the city.
low ground
high ground
retaining pools
86th Street Transverse (existing) 250ft
125ft 50ft
> 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.
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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 reďƒ&#x;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 ďƒžfty six bodies into fertilizer. > Looking across the labyrinth, spring.
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cucumber melon squash gourds
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.
onion garlic leek lettuce sunďƒ&#x;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.
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Chapter 2 Chapter | Society 2 and | Society Placeness and Placeness
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 afford a cemetery plot, and its custodians are the inmates from nearby
> Central reecting pool, winter.
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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 offering 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.
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Interlude 2 : Love and Fish
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Chapter 3 | Memory and Inheritance
Year 3: Inheritance and Memory
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Concord National Military Park
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Chapter 3 | Memory and Inheritance
Critic: Michael Bell Semester: FA2017 Site: Concord Naval Weapons Station, Concord, CA Size: 5,000 acres Program: military park and memorial
Sketch of Concord subdivision of Quinault Village, former naval ofcers’ housing on the edge of the Concord Naval Weapons Station, plus sketch of quantum coherence (property of how a chlorophyll particle nds its way by collapsing future possibilities and inhabiting all paths simultaneously). >
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“How is the housing question to be settled, then? In present-day society, just as any other social question is settled: by the gradual economic leveling of demand and supply, a settlement which reproduces the question itself again and again and therefore is no settlement....” - Fredrick Engels, “The Housing Question”
“Broad internalization of such discursive regimes as taming the frontier, advancing civilization, leading the free world, or ridding the world of terror creates spontaneous consent, the prerequisite for hegemony, thus enabling imperial conduct abroad while reinforcing domestic hierarchies.”
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“According to Maxwell’s second law of thermodynamics, the entropy in a system will increase...unless new energy is put in.... The city, the polis, is struggling to grow, and to change, perhaps even toward the day when the idea of the human is recognized in the energy, the life impulse and actions of each human being.” - Lebbeus Woods
“Identities and memories are not things we think about, but things we think with.” - John Gillis
- Walter Hixson, “The Myth of American Diplomacy”
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Chapter 3 | Memory and Inheritance
In the vast folded landscape is a eld of carbon husks. Some are tall and rigid like soldiers, in long lines describing perimeters through the yellow hills; below, others spread out like a dark pool, like a black lake spotted with trees. Between them, green lines of avenues reveal an irregular and curving grid: the husks occupy plots of what was a city on the plane below the hills, where now only a few skeletal towers rise from a thick forest that stretches to the distant line of mountains, which fall into the misty coast. You begin cutting down the steep ridges toward the husks. The only sounds are the wind in the long grass, mice and other small creatures, birds, a hawk overhead, and your footsteps on the soft, dry ground.
The rst line of carbon vigils stand every twenty feet and are each the size of a young tree, maybe ten feet tall and top-heavy. Near them you can hear a soft noise like radio static coming from them. Their far side is concave and porous like a sponge. Looking down the line of tall, silent husks you notice some unusual mounds in the grass: repetitive, and too regular to be natural. As the sun has moved into afternoon, shadows indicating more mounds visibly dot the hills – hundreds around you, concentrated on the at lowlands. You approach the closest mound. It is forty feet long and half as wide, taller than you, and thickly overgrown. Some digging reveals stained but intact concrete.
> Husks in eld, Concord Naval Weapons Station Regional Park, year 3525 (CE).
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Various sketches from carbon study notebooks.
Carbon farm growing, from upper left to lower right. These farms sequester atmospheric carbon into hard, usable panels. Images from an early carbon orchard as it grows a nanotube forest over ten days.
Image from an ear
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< Postcards of newly opened Concord Naval Weapons Station Regional Park and memorial, year 2050.
Sketch from designerâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s notebook of CNWS Parkâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s carbon scaffolds, marking the location of former barbed wire fence posts, year 2045. >
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Morning fog through the hills sits in the valleys and drifts across the backs of ridges, leaving trails of dew. The carbon sentinels crackle softly in the electolytic air. Fog rises into their hoods, soaks into structural wood members, and excites the proton exchange membrane sitting across them. The humidity pulls bicarbonate crystals of carbon dioxide from the hood’s resin and into the membrane, shuttling them across its span until they decouple into carbon and oxygen. Oxygen bubbles into the headspace of the membrane’s elecrolyser cells, and carbon molecules rise into bundles of honeycomb nanotubes and loose carbon strands that drift and self-assemble in the current exchanging bicarbonate and water. The husks are left by an early experiment in carbon nanober technology: carbon sponges grown on longdecayed wooden scaffolding. Their intertwined layer wind up like clockwork under solar radiation, and the lightest electric contact instigates an electric cascade. Carbon nanober sponges are up to 1,000 times more conductive than copper, and have 300 times the strength to weight ratio of steel. They are 90% air. > Wooden scaffolds, newly built, CNWS Regional Park, year 2048.
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Chapter 3 | Memory and Inheritance
As carbon syphoned from atmospheric carbon dioxide accumulates, the roofs of Concord darken and thicken. Family after family begins to meet their energy needs with carbon nanotube solar collectors, and nds economic independence from their homes by selling the excess. First local businesses and then nearby steel mills and processing factories switch from grid electricity to cheaper home-generated energy. Power plants gradually shrink into obsolescence, replaced by the aggregate power harvested by millions of homeowners. Subtly, economic and political power shifts into the hands of detached single-family homeowners, whose collective sprawl commands huge tracts of sky. Single-family homes grow and diversify economically, facilitating new households and in-home businesses. Concord transitions from a bedroom community to the cultural center of Contra Costa County. In Pittsburg to the north, single-family terracotta-roofed blue-pooled villas spread across the crest of hills overlooking the Concord Naval Weapons Station Regional Park, and their trucks of grading dirt – 37,000 tons – permanently ll 171 weapons storage magazines, ensuring their longevity.
Down the hill, past more buried magazines, through more lines of dark crackling husks, you cross a low stream grown around with willows, cottonwoods, oaks, and ashes. The sound of a woodpecker nearby, and startled lizards running across the rocky creekbed. As you approach the edge of the grid of low-lying husks they are much larger than their sentinel counterparts. They are squat and arched, and very dark, like caves turned inside-out. They reect almost none of the orange light that casts long blue shadows. They are maybe twelve feet tall, forty feet wide. They touch the ground with irregular arms that reach down from their domed tops. Grass, low bushes, and intermittent trees grow between them, up to their edges, and under them. They sit like discarded insect skins, dark and inert, in curving rows back as far as you can see. You touch a carbon wall. A shower of sparks expands from your nger like a ripple, cascading around the dome and down the legs.
Carbon shells in the elds of the Naval Weapons Station trace old lines of barbed wire fences; carbon on the houses provide solar energy
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< Schematic diagram of successive layers of carbon nanotubes, mechanically storing energy through stocastic resonance.
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Chapte Cha pterr 3 | M Memo emory ry y and In Inher her e ita itance nce c
< Detail: nanoscale of semi-permeable membrane collecting carbondioxide on trees and creating carbon nanotubes through a passive electrolysis, which separates carbon from oxygen. Detail: below membrane, glass tubes run water which evaporates, disengaging carbon from nanotrees above. >
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Chapte Cha pterr 3 | M Memo emory Chapte Cha ry ypter and r 3 In Inher | her Memo M e emory itance ita nce cryy and In Inher her e ita itance nce c
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Section: retrofitted suburban roof with sketched lines showing progressive build-up of carbon. >
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Solar energy collection materials – silicon in solar cells, lithium or cobalt or silver in batteries – and luminescent materials – phosphorus, zinc, strontium – are mined or collected in salt ats of Argentina, in pit mines of the Congo, Chile, and China. Their production is hazardous and their supply limited. They are articially cheap because they are more valuable than their producers. They sit on your roof and run through your walls. The house rises around you: wood from trees processed by gas-powered machines, plastic pipes and linoleum oors and asphalt shingles from petroleum by-products, nickel from Indonesian mines, copper wires, berglass insulation produced in industrial smelting plants from sand and limestone. Materials collected, disassembled, and re-combined in ordered bers, each step dissociating the product from its origin. Your house feels safe, contained, and human because the ecology has been stripped from every element. The world of your house is clean – you dust and vacuum to remove the debris of passing days, the material deterioration of walls and carpets.
Your environment is carefully organized to reinforce your centrality. Lines of production coming from around the world, across time and space, tapping ancient veins of energy and minerals, carried on the backs of countless disposable workers, coordinated by numerous global economic supply chains to deliver raw materials to inhuman-scale factories, all conspiring to bring you the screws in your walls, laminate on your counters, expanse of your carpets, vinyl baseboards, and pristine length of your glass windows. You are presented with the house as an object, divorced from its erection. Your house on its street, in its quiet neighborhood, in its city, with its transit lines and highways, with its glass skyscrapers and green parks and expansive parking lots, plays its role in a vast social mechanism designed to deny its origin, to efface its nature. It’s designed to say: you are safe, you are an individual, you are important.
> CNWS Regional Park under construction, with bunkers already grown over, year 2020.
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Meanwhile, the hills rise behind your house. You see them in postcards advertising your bucolic city. The hills are wrapped in the militaryâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s barbed wire. The hills are ancient. In nearby cities, without naval bases controlling the territory, youâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve heard of mountain lions coming down from the hills and mauling people in their backyards.
> Concord Naval Weapons Station today, year 2017.
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> Schematic model of black carbon roofs on existing single-family Concord homes, year 2025.
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In the 1960s during the Vietnam War and again in the 1980s during the Central American Crisis protesters frequently picketed outside the gates of the Naval Weapons Station. They protested the magazines of weapons â&#x20AC;&#x201C; white phosphorus that reduced human bodies to messy liquids, nuclear missiles that, like magnets, exerted inert pressure, guns and ammunition â&#x20AC;&#x201C; being shipped to American soldiers abroad, or to anti-communist dictators and insurgent groups in Nicaragua and Ecuador. They
protested the moral war fought by the United States in the increasingly gray decades after the end of World War II, between competing economic-political systems, capitalism and communism: a war staged on the moral grounds of evil Axis powers and, earlier, of noble races verses savage foreigners. The grounds of Manifest Destiny and continental expansion â&#x20AC;&#x201C; the grounds of god-given hegemony, sanctifying global crusades against less enlightened nations.
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The Cobblestones of Pelourinho
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Critic: Mario Gooden Semester: SP2018 Site: Largo do Pelourinho, Salvador, Brazil Size: 3,500 SF Program: public bathroom and park
The performance of rain on the cobblestones. The performance of vines rooting. The performance of shoes eroding stone. The ritual of concrete curing. The ritual of removing, cleaning, and putting back. The ritual of downhill ows and channels. The fact of inltration. The fact of cracks widening. The fact of need
The square of Pelourinho, site of Salvador’s colonial-era public punishments and later a red light district, now the city’s tourist center. >
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“some 1,350 properties [were] restored in Pelourinho district…[for] tourism. Concurrently, the number of residents in the historic centre decreased from 9,853 in 1980 to 3,235 in 2000... “[During this time, IPAC’s renovation policies were] draining the historic centre of its key management, administrative and business functions and leading to a progressive population exodus and a corresponding deterioration of the urban landscape.” - UNESCO Retrospective
“[IPAC] usurp[ed] the right to care for and police the historic center’s inhabitants so as to safeguard its monuments...” - John Collins, Revolt of the Saints
< Photos from Pelourinho taken during site visit March 2018.
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Opposite: photos of Salvador taken during site visit March 2018. >
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“The world's only law. The masked expression of all individualisms, of all collectivisms. Of all religions. Of all peace treaties.” Anthropophagite Manifesto, 1928.
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“It was because we never had grammars, nor collections of old plants. And we never knew what was urban, suburban, boundary and continental. Lazy men on the world map of Brazil. A participating consciousness, a religious rhythm.”
“Against plant elites. In communication with the soil.” Anthropophagite Manifesto, 1928.
Anthropophagite Manifesto, 1928.
< Photos of Lina Bo Bardi’s Coaty restaurant, now abandoned, taken during site visit March 2018. >
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PROGRAM Literal (site specic) functional: pee shit fart vomit pleasure/illicit: drugs sex (self) sex (partner) selling solicitation
> Diagram of parallel processes of connecting with own humanity.
appearance changing upkeep (touch-ups) washing showering social emotional break semi-private conversation pleasantries advertising practice (speech)
“Euro-North American fascination with the unraveling of natural and cultural distinctions...points to the importance of...debates about “vitality” in the heritage center, and thus the ways these discussions help focus attention on issues of origins. This seems especially appropriate in the Pelourinho due to its associations with sexuality, reproduction, death, immoral acts, and bodily uids.” - John Collins, Revolt of the Saints 94 |
meditative art (drawing, graffiti) social media/email reading writing thinking
Interpretive (not site specic) 1. self-collection self-ablution 2. spontaneous encounters clandestine encounters 3. intimacy investigation / discovery 4. affirmation and reaffirmation learning social language(s) 5. discipline expression 6. reection (n) / reection (v) dreaming / daydreaming 7. polite indifference nightmares 8. creativity creation
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OCCUPANTS: max 50; ambient max 600 NUM. REQ. FIXTURES: (as IBC 2015 A-3 Assembly) stalls: 6 urinals: 3 sinks: 3 wash areas: N/A mirrors: N/A seats: N/A changing areas (incl. baby): N/A NUM. REQ. FIXTURES: (as IBC 2015 R-3 Congregate living) stalls: 5 urinals: N/A sinks: 5 wash areas: 6 mirrors: N/A seats: N/A changing areas (incl. baby): N/A NUM. PROPOSED FIXTURES: stalls: 8 urinals: 10 sinks: 4 wash areas: 2 mirror areas: 3 seat areas: 2 changing areas (incl. baby): 3
FUNCTION
MEDITATION
PLEASURE
SPACE PER FIXTURE: stalls: 20SF (assumes inscribed circle) urinals: 10SF (assumes privacy radius) sinks: 10SF wash areas: 10SF (est.) mirrors: 10SF (est.) seats: 10SF changing areas (incl. baby): 10SF (est.)
Function: 340SF Pleasure/illcit: 210SF Psychological: 210SF Meditative: 160SF Social: 130SF Appearance: 110SF
SPACE NEEDED: stalls: 160SF urinals: 100SF sinks: 40SF wash areas: 20SF (est.) mirrors: 30SF (est.) seats: 20SF (est.) changing areas (incl. baby): 30SF (est.) PROGRAMMED AREA: 400SF + 168SF (40%) circulation + 126SF (30%) support = 694 SF CURRENT AREA: 3400SF FREE AREA: 2666SF (80%)
stalls (F+M+Pl): 38% urinals (F+Ps): 24% sinks / wash (A+F+S+Ps): 19% seats / changing (S+Pl): 12% mirrors (A+Ps): 7%
STALLS
WASH/ SINKS
SEATING/ CHANGING
Function: 340SF Pleasure/illcit: 210SF Appearance: 110SF Social: 130SF Meditative: 160SF Psychological: 210SF
OBSERVATIONS Adjacent no touch: Meditation/Social Pleasure/Psychology Pleasure/Appearance
URINALS MIRRORS
Not Adjacent no touch: Meditation/Psychology Meditation/Appearance
AREA BY PROGRAM (with redundancy)
> Program diagrams assuming co-living occupancy status, to promote alternative uses of public restroom by local populations in need.
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Appearance becomes completely absorbed in Psychology Function is mostly unoccupied, as is Pleasure
PSYCHOLOGY
APPEARANCE
SOCIAL
“As Malaquias and I left the Maciel, we stopped by the Praça das Artes, Cultura, e Memória (Plaza of Arts, Culture, and Memory), an interior courtyard restored by IPAC in 1999. There a sculpture called “Redemption” gurgled hopefully. Encrusted with semiprecious stones whose safeguarding requires that the artwork be enclosed by an iron fence, the fountain announces that: ‘water washes away evil as compassionate tears sacralize this contemporary ritual. In the end, then, the place’s negative energies are inverted. ‘The Pelourinho’s destructive aspects evaporate, and from this we extract its regenerative power. ‘Out of condemned material we extract magical power, the mana of the condemned, whose magic is that of knowing how to reinvent life in a ritualized form again and again, again and again.’ ” - John Collins, Revolt of the Saints | 95
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stall: corrugated concrete + burnished steel
changing: matte concrete + corrugated glass
Function: (stalls, urinals, wash, sink) 1. corrugated concrete 2. matte concrete 3. burnished steel 4. corrugated glass
urinal: matte concrete
mirror: polished steel
Pleasure/Illicit: (stalls, changing, seating) 1. matte concrete 2. corrugated concrete 3. corrugated glass 4. burnished steel Psychological: (urinals, wash, sink, mirrors) 1. matte concrete 2. polished steel 3. burnished steel
sink: matte concrete + burnished steel
wash: corrugated concrete + corrugated glass + burnished steel
PRIMARY MATERIALS
Meditative: (stalls) 1. corrugated concrete 2. burnished steel
seating: matte concrete
Social: (seating, changing, wash, sink) 1. matte concrete 2. corrugated concrete 3. corrugated glass 4. burnished steel Appearance: (mirrors, wash, sink) 1. polished steel 2. corrugated concrete 3. matte concrete 4. corrugated glass 5. burnished steel
> Fixtures designed for Bo Bardi-inspired interior.
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> Interior view of bathroom.
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> Interior ď&#x192;&#x;oor plan
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The stones of Pelourinho have witnessed 450 years of Salvadorâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s life, including periods of violence and displacement. Their removal symbolically uncovers buried realities; their replacement in a new conď&#x192;&#x17E;guration allows the possibility of change.
> East-West site section.
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> Upper site section: public facilities with performance plaza above, ceiling plates staggered for light and air, and plantings beneath cobblestones to conduct storm and waste water to lower site.
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> Site section demonstrates complex vertical relationships which allow light, air, and safety for the underground space, while preserving the important plaza surface for performances. The lower site, today a fenced-off vacant lot, collects and filters water and liquid waste from the upper site and plaza.
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> Lower site section: Burle-Marx inspired garden and wetland, with underground drainage running from upper site under cobblestones.
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The project’s ambiguous plantings and tense location encourage inltration and occupation. It is meant for street people, shop owners, and tourists. The project’s construction involves removing and replacing every cobblestone in the square. The stones are replaced differently. Some are used to create a plaza in the new park; their vacancies allow plantings that conduct water from the bathroom to the wetland.
1. REMOVAL - of cobblestones from site to empty lot 2. EXCAVATION - of earth to empty lot; rerouting underground pipes 3. RETAINING - of earth; erection of molds 4. POURING - of concrete retaining walls 5. PLACING - of pipes, structure, and ltration systems 6. PLANTING - of ltration path, of underground ltration, of new park 7. REPLACING - of cobblestones in Pelourinho, of cobblestones in new park
> Site plan
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8. BUILDING - of oor, xtures, and ceiling slabs; of paths and benches in new park
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Brazilian ď&#x192;&#x17E;ltration plants for constructed wetland
Brazilian decorative and ambient plants
1 typha domingensis
5 anubias hastifolia
10 callisia repens
11 tradescantia spathacea
13 ophiopogon japonicus
2 lasia spinosa
6 cyperus alternifolius
14 neomarica caerulea
15 chlorophytum comosum
16 hemigraphis colorata
3 typhonodorum lindleyanum
7 xanthosoma aurea
17 syngonium angustatum
18 tradescantia zebrina
19 aechmea black jack
19 billbergia amoena
19 billbergia pyramidalis
19 neoregelia compacta
> Plant choice informed by Agua Carioca project by Studio X Rio, which uses Brazilian plants to ď&#x192;&#x17E;lter waste from a restroom. 4 colocasia esculenta
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Interlude 3 : Dreaming
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