Gowanaissance: Utopia from Dystopia

Gowanaissance: Utopia from Dystopia

SORREL ANDERSON | MIN Y. HONG Bachelors of Architecture Pratt Institute Fall 2015 Arch 501 “Vertical Urban Utopias” Professors: Kathleen Dunne | Michael Trencher Teacher’s Assistant: Shannon Hayes HMS 497B “The Dialectics of Verticality” Professor: Paul Haacke

CONTENTS

01. Concept Statement 02. Project Proposal 03. Genealogy 04. Site 05. Program 06. Precedent Study 07. Material a. Mateiral b. Facade Study 08. Core Study 09. Annotated Bibliography

[]* original images produced by Sorrel and Min

01 CONCEPT STATEMENT

[Composite Image: The Touch,2015] *

Gowanaissance : Utopia from Dystopia Remedeation of Gowanus Canal

[noun] dys·to·pi·a (dis•tōpēe/) : An imagined place or state in which everything is unpleasant or bad, typically a totalitarian or environmentally degraded one. [noun] ren·ais·sance (rĕn’ĭ-säns’, -zäns’, rĭ-nā’sens) : A rebirth or revival.

[French, from Old French, from renaistre, to be born again, from Vulgar Latin *renāscere, from Latin renāscī : re-, re- +nāscī, to be born;]

The skyscraper reconsidered is an exchange between material and immaterial infrastructures.

Architecture is an exchange between the biotic temporal scale of the human body and the geological temporal scale of infrastructure and urban systems.

Working between the dialectics of horizontal[verb] re·me·di·a·te(rĭ-mē’dē-eyt) :The act or process of remedying something that is undesirable or ity and verticality as well as materiality and immateriality results in the REbirth of the Gowanus as an area deficient: remediation of the pollution from the factories. of exchange. Where Gowanus was once a center for industry, goods, and pollution, it is reborn as a central [verb] re·vi·tal·ize (rē-vīt’l-īz’) :To impart new life or vigor to: plans to revitalize inner-city hub for people, energy, and information. neighborhoods; tried to revitalize a flagging economy. 1

1 American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition.

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 2011.

5

02 PROJECT PROPOSAL

[Gowanaissance Collage, 2015]*

WHY “ ‘WHY’ - what does that word mean? I forget.”

Alphaville, Jean Luc Godard 1965 WHY VERTICAL? Verticality implies a foil to the horizontal. The minimized footprint and maximized density created by vertical urban design leaves space for the opening and greening of surrounding areas. With urban acupuncture at the base, that is, a small scale breakage of the relentless urban fabric, this approach allows for urban revitalization and the rethinking of typical urban space.1 Tall towers also create space for vertical farming or food production. Reintegrating the living ghosts of streams and wetlands which once existed in Gowanus improves the life of the urban water system as a whole.

and out of Brooklyn. As train and truck transportation expanded with the newer infrastructure of the highway, shipping along the canal slowly died,. The utility of the canal eventually reduced to a dumping ground for toxic waste and sewage from the surrounding industry and neighborhoods. We propose the revitalization of Gowanus as a transportation hub for Brooklyn’s growing population and as a major hub of digital information in the form of a data center and media library for public access.

WHY INFRASTRUCTURE?

The case for increased interest and investment in infrastructure for architecture can be made alongWHY GOWANUS? side the renewed responsibilities of the architect with regards to sustainability. When architecture addressThe Gowanus Creek was once a wetland es- es and incorporates urban infrastructure within the tuarine environment, the brackish point of exchange very design, buildings maintain lasting utility and between salty and freshwater. It was a vital part of the therefore last longer. Truly great buildings incorposhoreline ecosystem. Our proposal, like that of dland- rate and consider existing conditions and systems to studio, includes a rebirth of the area as a wetland eco- create innovation and improvement of urban life. system.

By the 1860s, the Gowanus Canal was a major transportation spine for the exchange of goods into 1 Frampton, Kenneth. Megaform as Urban Landscape. Ann Arbor, Mich.: University of Michigan, A. Alfred Taubman College of Architecture Urban Planning, 1999.

7

Remediate! visitors to the newly restored waterfront. By combining green infrastructures, the blue infrastructure of the seawall, the transportation infrastructures of the highway and trains, and the remedial infrastructures The process of site remediation is a major of petroleum monitoring and in-situ remediation concern for the tower. It is ecologically, economical- wells, the Seattle Olympic Sculpture Park fully marries ly and socially responsible to develop land which has infrastructure and architecture in a sensitive and cobeen abused historically by industry. Not only does hesive solution. this project save unused land from being developed, but it also improves the urban landscape through the The Gowanus Canal community, while an very existence of the intervention. In recent years, the active Superfund site, has developed a plan for the development of classified brownfield sites has steadi- development of the waterfront as an extended ly increased due to lower land costs and tax incen- walkway park, called the SpongePark.3 Designed tives, providing an excellent opportunity for develop- by dlandstudio, the park seeks to not only provide ers and designers to work towards the remediation public access and park space along the Gowanus, and redevelopment of urban dead zones. but also to perform as a highly intelligent system ”a property, the expansion, redevelopment, or reuse of which may be complicated by the presence or potential presence of a hazardous substance, pollutant, or contaminant.1”

Through the increased interest in the development of brownfield sites, an incredible amount of successful projects have emerged. One of the most notable of such projects is that of Weiss and Manfredi Architects Seattle Olympic Sculpture Park.2 The park occupies what was once a petroleum refinery adjacent to the train and highways surrounding the waterfront. Weiss and Manfredi utilized this direct link to transportation infrastructure to embed several forms of infrastructure into a plinth guiding museum 1 “EPA.” Brownfield Overview and Definition. October 21, 2015. Accessed November 9, 2015.

2 Weiss, Marion, and Michael Manfredi. “Weiss/Manfredi: Seattle Art Museum: Olympic Sculpture Park.”. Accessed December 11, 2015. http://www.weissmanfredi.com/

8

of bioremediation and filtration for the stormwater runoff, which will continue to affect the canal postSuperfund. The infrastructural sewer system New York employs today combines both blackwater, graywater, and stormwater runoff; due to New York City’s combined sewer system, during events of overflow, raw sewage still inundates the canal. In the dlandstudio solution, not only will the increased permeable surfaces encourage groundwater retention, but a series of bioretention basins and cisterns will collect storm runoff and process the water through phytoremediation, or filtration through 3 Drake, Susannah. “Gowanus Canal Spongepark.” Gowanus Canal Conservancy. September 24, 2008. Accessed November 17, 2015. http://www.gowanuscanalconservancy.org/downloads/dlandstudio_GowanusCanal_SpongePark_9_24_08.pdf.

native wetland plantings. The Spongepark also utilizes water filtration through oysters in addition to three levels of wetland plantings. The retention basins are kept clear of detritus from gravel filtered street ends. The nuanced combination of ecological development, phytoremediation, public space and cultural involvement make the Spongepark viable and welcomed by the Gowanus community.

In the case of future remediation of the Gowanus water quality post-Superfund, combined sewer outflows likely will continue to place the canal on the EPA’s list of potentially contaminated sites. In the remediation of the site, our architecture seeks to restore the ghost streams and naturally occurring hydrology around Gowanus. Beyond the restoration of surface hydrology, the tower and surrounding area must work to combat the pollution of raw sewage overflows into the Gowanus Canal. The incorporation of living machine systems in the vertical ending the

water filtration system through a vertical farming systems adds another layer to the remediation or repurposing of the brownfield site.

The Newtown creek wastewater treatment center composes of stainless steel-clad digester eggs.

The wastewater treatment center employs futuristic lighting on its exterior eggshells. Different colors indicate various stages of the wastewater treatment process. The blue light identifies the main water treatment plant, as opposed to warm orange urban lights from the rest of the city. The bright white light indicates other functional parts of the plant and lastly, the yellowish light is used to indicate the pedestrian walkways4. This particular wastewater treatment plant precedent suggests how the process of remediation, including the physical refinery of water, can be “remediated” through architectural intervention.

4 “2013 OHNY Weekend Highlight: OHNY at Night | Blog OHNY.” Blog OHNY RSS. http://blog.ohny.org/2013-ohny-weekend-highlight-ohny-at-night-2/.

[Newtown Creek Wastewater Treatment Plant Photo credit: Jeff Goldberg/Esto]

02.Project Proposal

9

[ Cross section of the Pont du Gard by Alfred LĂŠger, 1875]

10

[ Engraving of the Pont du Gard by Charles-Louis Clérisseau, 1804]

“ I had been told to go and see the Pont du Gard; I did not fail to do so. It was the first work of the Romans that I had seen. I expected to see a monument worthy of the hands which had constructed it. This time the object surpassed my expectation, for the only time in my life. Only the Romans could have produced such an effect. The sight of this simple and noble work struck me all the more since it is in the middle of a wilderness where silence and solitude render the object more striking and the admiration more lively; for this so-called bridge was only an aqueduct. One asks oneself what force has transported these enormous stones so far from any quarry, and what brought together the arms of so many thousands of men in a place where none of them live.”

-Rousseau, Jean-Jacques from The Confessions and Correspondence, Including the Letters to Malesherbes 5. trans. Christopher Kelly, 1998, p. 214.

In the 1st century AD, the city Nemausus, the city Nimes was colonized under Roman Empire. The romans built Pont de Gard, an aqueduct to convey water from the water source of the Eure near Uzès to Nimes Castellum. Pont de Gard consists of six arches, each of them around 68 feet high. The lower level supports the eleven smaller arches of the second level, and above all of this lies a row of arches narrower and lower than the others. They support the tile-covered channels which carry water through. The route of the aqueduct is meandering; it evolved over 30 miles over mountains and valleys. The cross-section mimic ancient vertical high-rise building. This structure built from limestone carried water from a place to another; the channel carried not only the water for the people, but also carried vibrant culture as it flourished its town1.

1 “Pont Du Gard, Roman Monument - South of France.” Pont Du Gard, Roman Monument - South of France. http://en.destinationsuddefrance.com/Discover/Must-See/ Pont-du-Gard.

02.Project Proposal

11

[Conceptual sketch of the section of the data remediation tower, 2015]*

12

Revitalize!

The Data Center and Media Library REconsidered: Traditionally, the data center is a dark, isolated, and secluded building typology, it’s one purpose being to securely house the stored information of clients. In the reconsideration of the data center, the very processes associated with the running of the data center may serve as an energy advantage. The necessity of cooling for the servers can be provided by recycling of the Gowanus water, while the heat generated by the working servers may provide heat energy for surrounding programs and housing. 1 Additionally, the general isolation of the data center as a security measure reinforces the notion of the immateriality of data. The very placement of the data center in an urban center inherently informs the city-dwellers of the true materiality of the seemingly immaterial data they consume on a daily basis. In the combination of data center program and media library, each function informs the other. The new media library provides community access to databases and an immersive experience of written texts, film, images, etc. Erasing the distinction between the computer between human experince of media.2

1 Meinhold, Bridgette. “UNStudio Completes EEA Office Clad in an Undulating Energy-Saving Facade.” Inhabitat Sustainable Design Innovation Eco Architecture Green Building. April 25, 2011. Accessed November 17, 2015. http://inhabitat.com/unstudiocompletes-new-eea-tax-offices-clad-in-undulating-white-fins/eea-and-tax-offices-11/.

2 Bolter, J. David, and Richard Grusin. Remediation Understanding New Media. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1999.

The conceptual sketch on the left depicts how the tower is vertically stacked and integrated into the large footing consisting of large data storage. In addition, the inflated and horizontally stretched base implies green pathways connecting the building to the site, and possibly to other structures.

The Living Machine REconsidered: A “Living Machine” system installed in ecologically conscious buildings consists of the cycling of wastewater, generally storm runoff, through a series of chambers containing filtering plant life and bacteria at ground level.3 Our tower intends to expand this system into the vertical axis. At different levels within the tower Gowanus Canal water serves different functions, including basic filtration, cooling for the data center, filtration, solar thermal for the heating of programs, phytoremediation, and bioremediation, which finally culminates in irrigation for vertical farming using gravity and pressure through its way down back into the Gowanus. The tower functions as a macro-scale living machine by taking in mildly polluted water, and in flood events, raw sewage and cycling the water, utilizing and depositing it in a better state than which it entered the vertical system.

3 “Living Machine® Technology.” Ecological Wastewater Treatment by Living Machine®. Accessed November 17, 2015. http://www.livingmachines.com/About-Living-Machine.asp

02.Project Proposal

13

[Future Gowanus, 2015]*

The transparency of this system is of vital importance, as intelligent systems improving Gowanus can educate the occupants of the building’s vital functions. When occupants and visitors can see what infrastructure and architecture can do to remediate the valuable resource of water, interest in infrastructure can be renewed. Thus, systems and infrastructure working in concert have a vitality and beauty in themselves; through transparency and education, remediation can be fun!

14

Vertical Farming REconsidered: While farming along the vertical axis has been a human preoccupation since the early 1900’s, Practicing vertical farming has yet to realize itself as a mainstream method of food production. The vertical farm through hydroponics allows for increased productivity and yield through the efficiency of stacked crops and nutrient solutions. This highly controlled product reduces the dependency of urban areas on importing food, issues of over fertilization causing effluence and eutrophication in waterways, and a decreased need for herbicides and pesticides

VERTICAL FARMING [INTEGRATE STRUCTURAL FACADE SYSTEM]

VERTICAL WATER FILTERATION SYSTEM [UTILIZE ORGANIC PURIFYING SEQUENCE]

WINTER GARDEN WITH DATA DISPLAYS SUSPENDED SKY LOBBY

[Conceptual sketch of close up of the Data Tower, 2015]*

in food production. The integration of vertical farming within the living machine tower seems a natural progression, as residents may integrate living and participation in the building system’s production of hydroponically farmed food.

The close up sketch of tower demonstrates how the data center, living machine and the vertical farming systems are integrated. The tower acts as processing hub: water remediation, vertical farming utilizing purified water and gravitational force, and data processing center. All those parts are structurally integrated with the main core which remediates

water via a vertical organic purification system. In addition, the data center where people can access data in sensible form (visual, audible, and tactile) is interweaved between winter gardens suspended through parts of the structure. The winter garden is also closely connected to storing a botanical database, and varied in its vegetation biomes as the gardens climb vertically.

02.Project Proposal

15

Renaissance!

The Gowanus Canal was once a major hub of exchange; for goods and services, as well as pollution. Our architecture intends to bring the canal back to it’s former role as a nexus, however, rather than goods and pollution, the canal will be a site of exchange for people, information, and renewable energy production.

Through the creation of the transportation hub, access to a steadily developing area of Brooklyn will be made possible. The rebirth of the area as the physical transportation of people repurposes the community as a nexus for Brooklyn culture, rather than a dumping ground for waste and fringe communities.

Before it became a major transportation hub in the mid-19th to mid-20th centuries for the neighborhoods of Carroll Gardens, Park Slope, and surrounding areas, the Gowanus was once a tidal estuary; a brackish body of water running up into central Brooklyn. The ponds and streams provided early 18th century Brooklyn with freshwater, irrigation for crops, and mill ponds. The soft estuarine provided a buffer zone, reducing flooding at higher elevations. As the grey infrastructure of the canal moved in, filling in existing marshland, the “ghosts” of the estuary remained beneath the surface. The Gowanus Ghost Hunters, especially Edmuynd Diegle, works to uncover the still flowing creeks and streams 16

underneath the impermeable urban fabric. Through the use of aerial photography, century old map overlays, and field sampling, Diegel uncovers the truth of Gowanus’ underlying hydrology. The springs and creeks under the built-up concrete flow into the canal, provide water to water-hungry plant life, and cause flooding due to disregard for hydrology in original planning of street and stormwater infrastructure.

Our architecture proposes a new urban greenway linking two towers with separate functions, such a greenway would rebirth estuarine habitat, a renaissance of the natural hydrology of Gowanus.

[Clockwise from top left: “The Dreary Coast,� performed on the Gowanus Canal; founders of the Silent Barn, an arts collective in Bushwick; N. D. Austin, in hat, at a guerrilla party in a Manhattan building; inside Secret Project Robot, a Bushwick arts space.]

02.Project Proposal

17

03 GENEALOGY

[The tree of human evolution according to German evolutionary biologist Ernst Haeckel, 1891]

THE ORIGIN OF GENEALOGY

[noun] et·y·mol·o·gy (,ede’mälejē/) Genealogy (from Greek: γενεά genea, “gen:The study of the origin of words and the way in which their eration”; and λόγος logos, “knowledge”), genreally meanings have changed throughout history. known as family history, is the study of families and the tracing of their lineages and history.1 In the late twentieth century, however, Michel Foucault developed the concept of genealogy as a philisophical counter-history of the position of the subject which traces the development of people and societies over time. His genealogy of the subject accounts “for the constitution of knowledges, discourses, domains of objects, and so on, without having to make reference to a subject which is either transcendental in relation to the field of events or runs in its empty sameness throughout the course of history.” 2

1 Merriam-Webster. http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/genealogy.

2 Foucault, Michel (2003). The Essential Foucault: Selections from Essential works of Foucault, 1954-1984. New York, NY: The New Press. p. 306. ISBN 1-56584-8012.

19

Genealogy Sorrel Anderson

The Gowanus canal remains arguably the most unpleasant place in New York City. An extremely polluted, pungent, and stagnant body of water in the southeastern part of Brooklyn, Gowanus Canal still to this day receives raw sewage during periods of overflow, and leachate from surrounding industrial businesses established in the 1860s.

Yet why is this designated Superfund site a center of urban development and gentrification? Is it merely the close proximity to subway lines leading to Wall Street? Is this why Gowanus is even a Superfund site at all? When considering environmental sustainability, one must also consider that cleanups of sites take advocacy, action, and a great deal of money.

As a major artery of urban circulation for hundreds of years, the Gowanus itself has become completely congested. The current of the canal can be described as sluggish at best. As a site located between Route 27 and major subway lines, Gowanus provides opportunities for renewed urban infrastructure, including transportation, technology, waterfront, and green infrastructure. Connectivity and urban linkages must be a major concern for any project located here.

What remains clear, is that the tower must engage with the landscape at street level. Stan Allen’s 20

ideas of landform building, from his essay, “From the Biological to the Geological” which involves the integration of architecture and thickened landscape surface to create a new interface between urban streets and architecture provides opportunities for permeable and other forms of green infrastructure.

This reduces flooding in the area and grants public access to the waterfront. Allen also proposes that the landform building exists not simply as a field of void-like public conditions, but as a conglomeration of moments for charged programmed spaces. Therefore, at points of urban congestion, community and mixed programs can coexist.

The urban architectural interventions of New York city must take into account the dying 20th century infrastructures desperately trying to maintain a 21st century city. Stan Allen’s critique of postmodernist movement’s complete divorce between architecture and infrastructure within his essay, “Infrastructural Urbanism” which discusses the immaterial practice of drawing allowing architects to disregard the very real ways in which material objects work in systems. Through this, Allen asserts, that architects have marginalized themselves from the involvement in urban planning and development of infrastructure. He suggests a shift in architectural practice

towards large scale material considerations, or the removal of the egotistical “master planner” towards a material practice involving collective teams of architects, ecologists, and engineers in a “bottom-up” manner is best. Allen concludes with the declaration that the “time has come to approach architecture urbanistically and urbanism architecturally.” Future urban architectures must strive to improve the surrounding area, including local infrastructures and communities to be welcomed by increasingly active and vocal urban communities. Architecture can no longer afford the assumption that top-down urban developments can flourish in a modernizing city.

In the consideration of mega-cities, Kenneth

park surfaces. The proposal also addresses some of the contaminated soil issues through the manipulation of filtration soils and the introduction of biotic life that aides in remediation and filtration of water. In 2013, dlandstudio announced that the City acquired enough funds to make this park a reality after the Superfund remediation of the canal. With so much planning and investment into the Gowanus Canal for the future, it seems an ideal location for a tower aiding in the beneficial work from the cleanup, and providing a foil for the more problematic facets of development in the area.

Finally, the work of Keller Easterling in her analysis of “extrastatecraft” or infrastructures de-

Frampton’s piece “Megaform as Urban Landscape” discusses the modern megalopolis, the urban space created by the sprawl of the automobile city. Frampton’s delineation of a new architecture typology on a massive urban scale entitled, “the megaform.”

According to Frampton, the megaform, mixes programs, serves as an iconic landmark, serves as a public domain in an otherwise privatized zone.

Most importantly, and in opposition to Stan Allen, is Frampton’s assumption of the megaform’s “quintessential horizontality.” While Frampton believes that the megaform occupies the landscape often blending into the landscape itself, Allen’s notions of the landform building “trust in the compact, [yet] work with complex formations that accept both the horizontal and the vertical.” It would seem that Frampton’s work in “Towards a Critical Regionalism” might contradict his insistence that a megaform must occupy the horizontal axis in the case of New York City.

The 2008 proposal for Gowanus by dlandstudio explores the possibilities of lining the edges of the Gowanus with permeable parkspace surfaces, or active urban sponges. “The Spongepark” eases the burden of New York City’s combined sewer system by absorbing storm runoff with bioswales, or porous

veloped by private industries often outside of state regulation. The critique of such development not only increases power for monopolies including “Mitsubishi, Kawasaki, Siemens...”, and in the case of New York City information technologies, Time Warner Cable and Verizon, but also is a sub-par method of development. Easterling asserts that the most effective method of economic growth is simply, investment in the domestic economy, rather than stateless enclaves of trade and research development. In the analysis of information technologies and the infrastructure vital to the functioning of the 21st century city, the dependence on private entities in the development of new infrastructure is incredibly problematic. The fact that municipalities allow meta-infrastructures which “are generating de-facto, undeclared forms of polity faster than even quasi-official forms of governance can legislate them.”

In closing, our tower seeks to rectify urban issues of of pollution and decaying infrastructure for a historically underserved section of Brooklyn.

Through the integration of landform, vertical megaform, and material and immaterial infrastructures, our skyscraper hopes to better serve urban life.

03.Genealogy

21

Genealogy Min Y. Hong

There has been an endless pursuit for manifestation of utopia in architectural form, spanning from single building plans to mega-structures and urban plans. James Bartolacci argues in his summery of utopian design that where “architect’s ideals varied, they all held one thing in common: they could never be built”. 1 However, utopian construction cannot just reside in the visionary future or the present; Utopian construction is an index of memories of site.

projects as the tower streams water through and purifies for people to use. Through repurposing of data, virtual remediation restores lost memories and rejuvenates cultural heritages embedded deep in the soils of the site, Gowanus Canal. Each form of ‘media’ acts like Proust’s Madeleine by triggering restoration of recessed memories, of individuals, the building, and the site.3 Thus, combination remediation of the physical site and the data remediates the urban life of the given site, Gowanus Canal neighborhood.

Remediation Dialectic: Vertical vs. Horizontal Remediation happens on two different levels; physical and virtual. Physical remediation is the cleaning-up process of the polluted ground and water. It is a remedy process of an actual site. Physical remediation creates a firm and rigid ground for the site and the building, and even for the virtual remediation to take place.

Louis Sullivan in his classic essay “the Tall Office Building Artificially Considered” argued that “all things in nature have a shape, a form, an outward semblance… and it is the pervading law of all things organic and inorganic [that] form ever follow function”.4 Since then, countless modern buildings

the physical remediation of the site and the functional systems, the data center streams data and

have soared vertically, due to small, restricted urban footprints. Those tall slender buildings house various urban commercial and residential functions. Yet, the functioning, physically occupied by the people, space still resides on the horizontal planes even in

1 Bartolacci, James. “Rewind: Modernist Dreams Of Utopian Architecture.”

Architizer. August 26, 2013.

2 Bolter, J. David, and Richard Grusin. Remediation Understanding New Media.

Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1999

3 Proust, Marcel, and Andreas Mayor. In Search of Lost Time. New York: Modern Library, 2003.

4 Sullivan, Louis H. “The Tall Office Building Artistically Considered.” March 1, 1896.

Virtual remediation, re•media•tion, is defined as repurposing of media in this project.2 Tied with

22

[Paolo Soleri, Arcology: The City in the Image of Man, Cambridge, MA:The MIT Press, 1969]

tall slander buildings. In addition, some programs such as concert hall requires a horizontally stretched space to enable cultural intervention of larger group of people. However, it has become such a trend in urban area to build high-rise building. This can be also explained by what Alan de Botton re-defines as the rule of architecture Sullivan once defined; “it follows from this that the impression of beauty we derive from an architectural work may be proportionally related to the intensity of the forces against which it is pitted.” 5This idea also resonates with Kenneth

one cannot be defined without another in a space.

The true ‘verticality’ in building exist when those two opposing elements work together to juxtapose, therefore, defines each other further. For instance, in the horizontally stretched plans of mega structures depicted in Paolo Soleri’s Archeology images, there still is very strong trace of verticality in the core in its sectional drawing.

Infrastructure

Often, architects’ vision of the utopian city or Frampton’s argument for critical regionalism. Accordsociety include a major infrastructural development ing to Kenneth Frampton architectural autonomy is or reformation. Infrastructure is conventionally dein the tectonic, the syntactical and structural poetic fined the fundamental physical system that enables that resist the natural force of gravity.6 Therefore, the sustainability of societal living conditions.7 This these aesthetic and symbolic quality of verticality in buildings often override the very fundamental rule of “form follows function”, and neglect expression of horizontality in buildings even though it is the innate quality of any form to express both the horizontality and verticality.

In fact, both of them are directional, therefore 5 Botton, Alain. “The Architecture of Happiness.” New York: Pantheon Books, 2006.

6 Frampton, Kenneth. “Towards a Critical Regionalism: Six Points for an Architecture of Resistance.” Edited by Hal Foster In The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, 16-30. New York: New Press, 1988.

includes bridges, highways, major transportation hubs, railroads, subway lines, even electricity cables across the field. Theses physical Infrastructure used to be more horizontally developed, because the population grew horizontally. Nowadays, however, the physical infrastructure needs to express vertically and form vertical web to support vertically growing civilization. The tower design incorporates infrastructures which can function vertically, such as water 7 Fulmer, Jeffrey (2009). “What in the world is infrastructure?”. PEI Infrastructure Investor (July/August): 30–32.

03.Genealogy

23

[Landschaftspark]

treatment system and data storage center in the core.

Infrastructure is also a crucial element in urban remediation process because it forms a connection between entities, therefore it can be restored and reformed even after its original function is not in need. The classical example in NYC is the Highline Park. It used to be a railroad, now reformed into an iconic park space connecting the cultural and economic elements of the NYC Chelsea area. Another example is Landschaftspark in Duisburg-Nord, Germany, designd by Latz + Partner. This park embraces the abandoned industrial complex to restore memory of the site’s history, and give rebirth to park space in connection to the neighboring parks and area.

INDEX: architecture and culture An index has been conceptualized as a “physi24

cal connection which embalmed a fraction of time or moment”.8 Therefore it enables the material and the spiritual, reality and magic, life and death, and the different dialectics to exchange across the boundaries.

In semiotics, defined by C.S. Peirce, an icon is defined as physical resemblance between signifier and signified, a symbol is defined as arbitrary relation between signifier and signified; sign gains meaning through social convention, and an index is defined as signifier has a direct correlation in space and time with the signified.

Gowanaissance project is not only an icon which physically represent the given site and background, but also an index which in itself defines the concepts and is resonates with the given site and cultural context.

8 Mulvey, Laura. “Chapter Three. the Index and the Uncanny: Life and Death in the Photograph.” In Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image. Reaktion Books, 2006.

[Clockwise from top left: “Alphaville” Jean-Luc Godard 1965, “Landschaftspark”, “Port du Gard” Sud de France, “Mediaroom” Google ]

Aesthetics and Sublime Weather it follows function, economy or any other traits, a building expresses a form. This form of building is a mediator of all those traits a building inherits in a culture. In case of mega structures, a form is more than just a functional expression because the building becomes omnipresent in the urbanscape.

The building becomes a sublime entity. Nowadays, those structures are not only seen during the day, but also strikingly prevailing during the nighttime with the electric lighting. David E. Nye in his writing “American Technological Sublime” introduced the concept of electric cityscape: “This vibrant landscape was the product of uncoordinated individual decisions, yet it had a collective effect – a kinetic impact – … the myriad lights produced a lively landscape … the electrified city was something fundamentally

new, an unintended sublimity”.9 Renowned French film director Jean-Luc Godard employed the chiaroscuro, sharp contrast between light and dark, as aesthetic technique highlighting dystopian world.

Sublime entity leaves an observer a feeling of inferiority and insignificance before the immense power of its being. It is crucial that one takes the importance of aesthetic quality of electrified sublime so that the structure visually connects to the given site is also an important concern for this project.

9 1996.

Nye, David E. “American Technological Sublime.” Cambridge: The MIT Press,

03.Genealogy

25

04 SITE

[Photo: A. Jesse Jiryu Davis]

GOWANUS CANAL

The Gowanus Canal is a 100-foot wide, 1.8mile long canal located in the New York City borough of Brooklyn, Kings County, New York. The canal is connected to Gowanus Bay in Upper New York Bay. The canal is surrounded by several residential neighborhoods: Gowanus, Cobble Hill, Carroll Gardens, Park Slope, and Red Hook. 1 The Gowanus Creek was once a wetland estuarine environment, exchanging between salty and freshwater. A vital part of the shoreline ecosystem.

Our proposal and that of dlandstudio include a rebirth of the area as a wetland ecosystem.

By the 1860s the Gowanus Canal was a major transportation spine for the exchange of goods into and out of Brooklyn. As train and truck transportation expanded with newer infrastructure shipping along the canal slowly died, the utility of the canal reduced to a dumping ground for toxic waste and sewage from the surrounding industry and neighborhoods.

We propose the revitalization of Gowanus as a transportation hub for Brooklyn’s growing population and as a major hub of digital information in the form of a data center and media library for public access.

1 “COMMUNITY INVOLVEMENT PLAN.” GOWANUS CANAL SUPERFUND SITE. http://www3.epa.gov/region02/superfund/npl/gowanus/.

27

HISTORY The Gowanus Canal was originally a tidal creek in the saltwater marsh of western Brooklyn.

According to local legend, Dutch farmers named the tidal creek Gowanes Creek after Chief Gouwane of the local Lenape tribe. The name Gowanus also relates to the Dutch word Gouwee, which means bay. It was the Dutch people who first occupied the area back in 1636, since Jacob Van Corlaer, a Dutch official, purchased land from Gowane. The Dutch occupied Gowanus until the 1660’s before the English took over1.

The Gowanus wetlands provided ideal habitat for many species of fish and other wildlife including oysters, swans, fish, turtles and beavers.

One of the most notable species was the oysters that flourished in the brackish water of the creek. In fact it was the Gowanus oyster that became one of the first exports to Europe by Dutch settlers. 2

2 1

“Gowanus Canal Corridor Historic Preservation Studio II: Planning”, Columbia University, New York May 2008

[1766 Map of Brooklyn]

28

“Reconsidering Gowanus.” Baruch College. http://www.baruch.cuny.edu/ realestate/events/reconsidering-gowanus-event-archive.html.

[1867 Stiles Map of Brooklyn, New York Geographicus Brooklyn ]

[Photo : Seymour Zee Zolotofofe_ Via The Glory of Brooklyn’s Gowanus_1935]

[Drawing of an Oyster:“The Old Stone House.” The Gowanus Creek. http://theoldstonehouse.org/education/school-visits/the-gowanus-creek/.]

[Old Stone House. Circa 1900: Photo by Ralph Irving Lloyd. Courtesy of the Brooklyn Historical Society ]

04.Site

29

Pollution of the Gowanus Canal has two principal sources. The manufactured gas plants, coal yards, concrete-mixing facilities, tanneries, chemical plants, oil refineries and other businesses that operated along or near its banks discharged toxic waste directly into the water. Contaminants also seeped into the ground, and possibly the groundwater, under these industrial sites.

A second significant source is the runoff from local streets and sewer overflows during heavy rains. In Gowanus, as in other parts of New York City and many older municipalities, sanitary sewage and storm water are collected by the same system. Compounded by Gowanus’ bowl-shaped topography, the aging and overtaxed system cannot handle the combined flow of sewage and storm water during heavy rains, and the overflow is discharged directly into the canal.

30 Efforts to alleviate pollution in the canal date back almost a century, when public pressure resulted in the construction of a 12-foot-wide tunnel stretching to nearby Buttermilk Channel, where fresh water was drawn in to flush the canal.

The tunnel broke down in the 1960s and was decommissioned. When the tunnel and pump were restored in 1999, after a 38-year hiatus, fresh water flowed freely again, substantially reducing noxious odors emanating from the canal and enabling the return of marine life. The Gowanus was last dredged in 1998.1

According to Christos Tsiamis the Senior Project Manager of the USEPA superfund Gowanus site major concerns for the future development of the Gowanus Canal area include the possibility of pockets containing liquid tar within the sediment from

1

p. 29-30, Reconsidering Gowanus

Nat B i the ve Am egi n w e sett etlan ricans ig o lers d . Th area (led b f Go e c later y Ch w a reek i ’s la called “ ef Gow nus rge Gow ane ) :1 a oys ters nus Cr sell la 636 e n bec e om k” to ds in exp e a n Dutch or t Bro to E otable uro The okly pe. tow n an n b e d vi c o llag m e e of Bro s cit The C r okly y : e N n be 1 8 wid ew Y ek en G ork b com 34 e owa Sta c ea o cit y nus te Le me .

Cree gisl s C a k ture an R ich i n t ards o an aut al: ’ pla ind hori n fo ustri zes 184 9 f r th al c e ci ana unds t ty o l (D o f Br anie The ook C lyn. l crea Gow ana ) tes anus l E x a1 00- Canal ten fo s But ot-wid Impro ion ler S : v e tree chan ement 186 t so 6 n A hu uth el ex Comm -70 to H tend i tha ge “re Sew ami ing ssion l t lton buil drain ief sew er f s C d Ave rom Stre ings even s er” is la onn n u e. e pub et. The mptie quare id to c ect mile onn ed s l i c n i n indu out e e t s stria cry o w sew o the . Wate ct exist : 18 hea r fro ing 80 er l wa ver e d t Bro ste flo he ste nds fl of ca m stre sewers okly win e o n’s m g in nch fro oding nal at ts and arit to th m ra but Butle ime e ca w s r and nal, ewa creates com now ge a mer a hu nd The Bl cial b acti for com Gow oom v i mer a n u s t i y. ng cial can is am Gow als, o wit ng t anu hs s: ix h e mov millio nation 192 ’s 0 n ing thro tons busie s Wor ugh of st ld W c a it an rgo ar I nua I ge lly. ner Wor ates l d boo W min ar g b II : usin ess 194 5 fo indu r port strie s.

The 11 : wid flushin Flus the e, brick g tunn h can e al. lined c l, a 6,2 ond 80uit, foot is co lon nstr g, 12 ucte -fo d to ot “flu sh” 194 Nat 0s ura : the l ga Na plan reduct s reach tura ts a ion o es B l G long f re rook as the lianc lyn b Pip c a n e on y p i al. man pelin elin ufac e, a es ture llow d ga ing s

19

18

The 25 : Mid Erie C Erie a dem west a nal op Can en a and nd on t incre s, con l Op he w asin nec en 184 aterfrong dockinting New s t. ga Y Atla 0s nd ork to war Rich ntic Ba : Atl eho the a s a use war rds. T in bui nti eho he 4 lt in c B use 0-a n a e com cre arby sin ba R p O 185 lex in the sin is theed Hook b pens l p ort arge y Dan The 7 : of N st p iel com City of Sew i ew York er and preh Bro e r o ens klyn sy st ive c 187 sewer syosmpletes em tem the w Park 0 : (wi sew Slope Sew tho orld’s fi ut t ers reat rst tha develo er D t dr p men ain s with rain t ). into new s in the can brown to C al. ston an es a a l nd

[Historical Timeline of Gowanus Canal ]*

heavy industry, including that of Citizen’s Gas Light Company and Municipal Gas Light Company beginning in 1893.

Additionally, the standard of remediation that the government would require for the creation of parkspace upon brownfield conditions like that of the highly polluted Gowanus must be at residential level, which is the highest level of remediation standards.

This is required due to the number of hours people are expected to occupy and work at ground levels where one may gain exposure from outgassing and physical contact with pollution. park space.

Alongside Susannah Drake of dlandstudio, the USEPA is in the design and testing phase of grey infrastructures to work alongside the aforementioned green infrastructure of dlandstudio. These devices in development centrifugally separate oil and water from the surface Gowanus water. The design phase for Superfund remediation also includes holding tanks to allow for stormwater retention during storm events.

While Tsiamis concedes that there is no way for the Gowanus to develop a swifter current to encourage passage of pollutants and waste, he does maintain that the canal is affected by tidal forces.

Something which he suggests, with the proper hydrology designs, may take advantage of extensions of hard and soft banks in the creation of a wetland

04.Site

31

Pr

Com opo s buil munit al t o y da sew activ Div age ists e trea sec rt S tme ure e nt p the wa 19 lant city ge to d ’s c New 50s : iver omm 196 from Jersey : Be t se T wag itmen 0s the cont gin The rea t e fro New aine ing m t to the DEP R tme York r po o he Bro ed H nt side rts dr f De c a okly ook Pl nal. of t aw b cl a nN s h e n e ha usin ine avy wag rbo ess a e to Y r. way wou ard to treatm pen 1 ld o help ent s : 9 8 1 the p h 3 l 9 T he rwi andl ant o 89 : se fl e s (DE Depar DEP ow ewa pens in P) is tme into ge flus sue nt o Reh the that brin hing tu s a fac f Envir abil can al.

R g th nne ilitie onm at i s e w l in The eact ater resp plan t ental P on P Flus iva up t onse o reh rote la hing t tun ion 199 o federa to a cou abilitatection n nel : 1 l r stan t or the is re The 5 : acti 999 dard der t the New Y Flus vate o s. flus ork C hi d.

The h n i i ng t ty D g off New Y unn EP b Re a re ork el, p egin co zon City n um s ing Dep R p, a the re stru effo artm ezo nd p con rt f rop stru ctio or t ent of ning elle ctio n he C r. n of i N t : Gow y Pla 20 2 The ati 0 n a 0 0 E o nus ning 7 2 T pro nviro na h : e ar k pos Fea Gowan Res es nment l Pri framew ea wi icks sibi th a us C tor the al Pr or o r a l k i gre ty an a stu Gow otect itie Eng emen Study al Ecos tion anu ion A s L dy. inee t be beg yste s C gen ist f in t ede m Be ana c ral a rs and ween t s with Rest gin l fo y (EPA : 200 s t ora h h g a e r t ) Re enc e Ne g 9 Prio he ies a w Y U.S. A cost-sh tion ritie Nat ion II arin gree ork rmy s Lis iona to s City D Corps g t (N l har PL). e th EP. The of e $5 c mill ity and ion cost 20 SUP 10 : Nat ERFUN Sup iona D D e l Pri ESIG r fun orit NAT ies ION d : EP Rem A pl R edia em ace s th l Ac e e Ca tion dia nal l (RA A t he ): C cti ons o truc n : tion 20 17 of 1: B utle Dredg the re -22 i r m n 3: 9 S th S 2: 3rd treet t g the c edy; tree Stre a o t to et to 3rd St nal. r 21s t St 9th Str eet /Eri e e e Ba t sin

Manhattan

Brooklyn Downtown

Advanced Cooling System Location Gowanus Canal is situated at the locus of Economic, Green, and cultural points in NYC. Public transportation system connects this area to larger New York City area and downtown Brooklyn. The proximity of the site to Barclay’s center, which is a new cultural development hub in Brooklyn, creates cultural flow. In addition, the site is between water edge and large green space, Prospect Park, therefore the site has potential to create a greenway that connects Brooklyn with sustainable route in larger scale.

32

Barclays Center

Highways Majorroads Minorroads Greenspace

Prospect Park [Site Proposal, 2015]*

04.Site

33

Site Analysis : Population Gowanus has seen an increase in younger populations of young college graduates seeking cheaper rents, while maintaining accessibility to Manhattan and other parts of Brooklyn since the 1980s. Just a fifth of housing in Gowanus is made up of structures with 20 or more housing units, a very common typology for New York City.

Due to close proximity to subway lines along Fourth Avenue and Smith Street, ease of access to major highways, and cheaper land costs, Gowanus remains an extremely attractive neighborhood for existing and new industries.

Land Use 1&2 Residential

Institutions

Multi Residential

Industrial

Mixed Use

Parking

Commercial Vacant Lots Source : NYC Dept. of City Planning (2014)

34

15% 10%

7%

5% 0% -5% -10% -15% -20% -25% -30% -35%

1970-1980

1980-1990

Gowanus Area

Boreum Hill

1990-2000

Carroll Gardens

Park Slope

Population Change by Neighborhood *

+ 3 Bedrooms

Studio Apartment

1 Bedroom

2 Bedrooms

Housing Types in Gowanus Canal* 35

Site Analysis : Transportation Due to close proximity to subway lines along Fourth Avenue and Smith Street, ease of access to major highways, and cheaper land costs, Gowanus remains an extremely attractive neighborhood for existing and new industries.

F

The Gowanus area contains a growing and vocal artist community AGAST has 140 members and advocates for interests of artists and general spirit of the community. Around 4% of the Gowanus area workers are home-based, almost double the percentage of home-based workers in Brooklyn as a whole. This percentage is indicative of the amount of artists and freelance professionals in the area.

G

R F

G Transit, Roads, and Subways Roads Water

Subways

Source : Metropolitan Transportation Authority

36

Subway

Car

Home Based 0%

10%

20%

30%

Gowanus Area

40%

50%

60%

70%

Larger Brooklyn Area

Commuting Method Comparison*

Home-Based

Car

Subway

i

k

Commuting to Work* 04.Site

37

Site Analysis : Wetlands A great deal of post-industrial properties are underutilized in the area, providing spaces for possible housing developments and attracting many emerging tech companies to the spacious warehouses along the waterfront and in the neighborhood.

Although new tech and creative companies are flooding into the Gowanus area, companies like Time Warner Cable and Verizon have failed to invest in telecommunications technologies in what were considered poor investment areas.

Old Creeks (1867) Source Spring Marsh Land Old Creek Source: 1867 Stiles Map of Brooklyn New York, Geographicus

38

PHOTO DEGRADATION OF CONTAMINANTS ATMOSPHERIC NITROGEN

RUNOFF EPHEMERAL MARSH

EPHEMERAL MARSH

BANK STABILIZATION GROUNDWATER FLOW SLOW RELEASE OF STORED WATER AEROBIC AND ANAEROBIC NUTRIENT CYCLING

UPTAKE OF NUTRIENTS

PLANT UPTAKE OF NUTRIENTS SATURATED PEAT STORES WATER

MAIN CHANNEL Wetland Processes Diagram*

27% Vacant (or used for parking)

Occupied

Industrial Land Use in Gowanus Canal* 04.Site

39

SIte Analysis : Contamination The GSAPP at Columbia University analysed projected contamination plumes at the Gowanus site based on historical industiral uses from 1893 to 1942.

Gowanus Canal Contamination Source

[Eco-Gowanus: Urban Remediation by Design]

40

[Eco-Gowanus: Urban Remediation by Design]

04.Site

41

Option 1

42

Option 2

04.Site

43

Option 3

44

Option 4

04.Site

45

05 PROGRAM

[A sectional view of the New York Public Library. Cover of Scientific American, May 27, 1911. Image via the New York Public Library]

REMEDIATION, RE•MEDIA•TION Remediation, Restoration, Rehabitation, Revitalization

The tower remediates the site by wastewater treatment system. This cycle takes polluted water from the site and then processes water through the vertical core to purify and then irrigate vertical farming system. Also, the tower remediates data by repurposing the law data from data center and providing data access in media library and film studio, eventually through broadcasting to larger urban area. The tower also remediates the urban life by incorporating cultural community programs vital for the Gowanus community.

47

Key Programs Key programs included in the towers provide living and working spaces within a remediation and living machine.

At the base of the tower, elevated and low lying parkscapes create resiliency, new urban promenades, and infrastructures. The production tower, not only produces clean energies and remediated water, but also film and artist studios as well as flexible office spaces. Here, the data center, botanical and media libraries are integrated, providing community database and information access. Additional residential and community cultural centers provide opportunities for urban renaissance as well.

48

CULTURAL PROGRAM: THE INTEGRATION OF CULTURAL PROGRAMS LIKE MUSEUM/ GALLERIES, ARTISTS STUDIOS AND PERFORMANCE AREAS STRENGTHEN T HE INFLUENCE OF THE ARTISTIC COMMUNITY IN GOWANUS

BROADCAST

CULTURAL

COMMERCIAL

RESIDENTIAL/AFFORDABLE HOUSING: THE ADDITION OF AFFORABLE HOUSING MAINTAINS THE DESIRE TO COUNTERACT THE SPREAD OF GENTRIFICATION AND EXPLUSION OF THE EXISTING POPULATIONS IN GOWANUS. THE CREATION OF DESIREABLE AND AFFORABLE HOUSING IS A GOAL OF THE URBAN RENSAISSANCE RATHER THAN THE LAISSEZ FAIRE EFFECTS OF GENTRIFICATION DEVELOPMENT OF CITIES

RESIDENTIAL

COMMERCIAL: A SECTION OF THE TOWER HOUSES OFFICE SPACES SEEKING TO ATTRACT THE DEVELOPMENT OF TECHNOLOGY SERVICES AND DESIGN COMPANIES SHARING RENTED SPACES THE JUXTAPOSITION AND COLLABORATIVE EFFORTS OF TECHNOLOGY AND ART/DESIGN MAKE FOR A CREATIVELY CHARGED ATMOSPHERE

CULTURAL INSTITUTIONAL: THE TWO-FOLD INSTITUTIONAL PROGRAMS OF PUBLIC DATA ACCESS AND EDUCATION AGAINST THE CULTURAL ARTISTIC EXHIBITION AND DISPLAY CREATE AN ARCHITECTURE WITH A STRONG CONCIOUSNESS OF SOCIAL EQUITY AND THE SPIRIT OF THE GOWANUS CANAL. A NEIGHBORHOOD PREPARING FOR A

CULTURAL

INSTITUTIONAL INSTITUTIONAL

TRANSPORTATION HUB

05.Program

49

REMEDIATION One of the main concerns of the site is polluted water from the ground contamination and untreated sewer disposal into the canal. The tower adapts vertical wastewater treatmet system which remediates water on site up the tower. Treated water then moved down on gravity, irrigating plants from vertical farms.

providing cooling to the data center. The water is utilized for solar thermal and radiant heating for occupied spaces. It is then remediated further to provide irrigation for vertical farming and landscaping needs.

The interrelationship between remediation and use leaves exiting water from the building cleaner than when it entered.

Gowanus canal water is filtered through sand, then cycled through various remedial systems, ROOF RAINWATER COLLECTION STORAGE CISTERNS

VERTICAL FARMING IRRIGATION

RADIANT HEATING

SOLAR THERMAL PIPES ON FACADE POLISH CHAMBER EXTERIOR NATIVE PLANTING IRRIGATION

STAGE 2 BIOREMEDIATION CELLS STAGE 1 BIOREMEDIATION CELLS PRIMARY LIVING MACHINE CHAMBER

COOLING FOR DATA SERVERS RS SAND FILTER AQUIFER RECHARGE

GOWANUS CANAL WATER

HEAT ENERGY FROM DATA CENTER

[remediation cycle,2015]*

50

RE•MEDIA•TION The data center is one of most critical infrastructure needed in Brooklyn area; transaction and storage of data requires vast physical structure and

biological genetic information. Those data is connected to vertical farming system.

intricate system. The tower can support needs for this new system.

Gowanus canal area has large share of films and broadcasting. The tower creates space to store data for those industires and also broadcast the collected data. In addition, the data center includes

RENEWABLE ENERGIES

UNUSED ENERGY BOUNCED TO GRID ABSORPTION CHILLER

WASTE HEAT COOLING BOILERS BUILDING OPERATIONS HVAC

DATA SERVER HEAT “TOP UP” HEAT

[remediation cycle,2015]*

05.Program

51

the Plant and the Planet The technology enables us to produce electricity from living plants at practically every site where plants can grow. The technology is based on natural processes and is safe for both the plant, and its environment.

Via photosynthesis a plant produces organic matter. Part of this organic matter is used for plantgrowth, but a large part can’t be used by the plant and is excreted into the soil via the roots. Around

O2

the roots naturally occurring micro-organisms break down the organic compounds to gain energy from.

In this process, electrons are released as a waste product. By providing an electrode for the micro-organisms to donate their electrons to, the electrons can be harvested as electricity. Research has shown that plant-growth isn’t compromised by harvesting electricity, so plants keep on growing while electricity is concurrently produced.

CO2

H2O

CATHODE

Micr Mi c o Orrgani gaani nism nism s s

H+

MEMBRANE

e-

ANODE

C6H12O6

CATHODE

ANODE

CO2

MEMBRANE

O2

[Generating Elecrticity, 2015]*

52

The towers integrate Food works cycle; from production to processing, to consumption, and even to post consumption, which feeds back to the beginning of the cycle.

Supermaket Need Index high med low

The towers not only produce agricultural products from vertical farming, but also process raw vegetables to distribute those to on-site restaurants and fresh markets. This minimizes the travel distance of a product, thus, decreasing the carbon footprint

Export to Other Neighborhood Eco-Packaging

[Supermarket needs index, NYC planning Dept., 2015] Source:

Home Delivery Restaurants Fresh Markets

NYC Dept. of City Planning

Compost

PRODUCTION

PROCESSING

DISTRIBUTION

CONSUMPTION

POST- CONSUMPTION

Generate Food, Clean Air, and Electricity

Provide Work

Minimize Travel Distance

Slow Food

Back to the Cycle

Organic Waste Disposal System [Foodwors cycle, 2015]*

53

VEGETABLES

GREENS

GREENS

CEREAL

LEGUME

ONION/GARLIC

55.1 lbs / 100 ft2

1.6 lbs / 100 ft2

33.9 lbs / 100 ft2

3.7 lbs / 100 ft2

9.2 lbs / 100 ft2

101.4 lbs / 100 ft2

EGGPLANT

KALE

BROCCOLI

WHITE WHEAT

PEAS

ONION

39.3 lbs / 100 ft2

34 lbs / 100 ft2

38.5 lbs / 100 ft2

2.6 lbs / 100 ft2

2.8 lbs / 100 ft2

40.9 lbs / 100 ft2

CUCUMBER

CHARDSWISS

CAULIFLOWER

BUCKWHEAT

LENTILS

GARLIC

27 lbs / 100 ft2

160.7 lbs / 100 ft2

36.7 lbs / 100 ft2

4.6 lbs / 100 ft2

4.6 lbs / 100 ft2

68.7 lbs / 100 ft2

SWEETCORN

CELERY

BRUSSELSPROUTS

DURUM WHEAT

SOYBEANS

BELL PEPPERS

84.2 lbs / 100 ft2

69.4 lbs / 100 ft2

7.3 lbs / 100 ft2

4.8 lbs / 100 ft2

17.6 lbs / 100 ft2

POTATOES

CABBAGE

ASPARAGUS

OATS

GREEN BEANS

72.5 lbs / 100 ft2

85.8 lbs / 100 ft2

14.3 lbs / 100 ft2

15.3 lbs / 100 ft2

CARROTS

LETTUCE

ALFALFA

RICE

34 lbs / 100 ft2

3.5 lbs / 100 ft2

BEETS

RYE

6.5 lbs / 100 ft2

BARLEY

[Vertical Farming Chart, 2015]*

of food production cycle. In addition, post-consumption, the food is organically decomposed in remediation tower to nourish the production process.

According to the FDA, the average American alone consumes 707.7lbs of fruits and vegetables each year. The Tower’s Vertical farming system is on-site food production for Gowanus, and the larger Brooklyn area. This neighborhood is indicated to have high supermarket need index according to NYC 54

planning department. Vertical farming system in a tower can be a solution for both the tenants of the tower and the neighborhood. In addition, connection to the botanical genetic lab makes the production of food more fertile.

DAILY CONSUMPTION OF

1 lb

=

1 PERSON (3500 cal)

100 ft2

=

36.6 lbs

100 ft2

=

36 PEOPLE

05.Program

55

Interweaving the Cycles

PUBLIC

PRIVATE

RECREATION GYM OFFICE BOTANICAL LAB

SERVICE

TECH LAB

OXYZEN BOTANICAL DATA ELECTRICITY

FOOD

PERMANENT RESIDENCE O2

CO2

CATHODE

MEMBRANE

ANODE

H+ H2O

CATHODE

Micro Organisms Organi anism sms sms

MEMBRANE

ANODE

C6H12O6

e-

GALLERY

VERTICAL FRAM

O2

CO2

OXYZEN

STUDIO UNUSED ENERGY BOUNCED TO GRID

RENEWABLE ENERGIES

SERVICE

CARBON DIOXIDE

RESTAURANT

ABSORPTION CHILLER

DAYCARE

WASTE HEAT COOLING

KINDERGARTEN

BOILERS BUILDING OPERATIONS

RETAIL

MARKETING DATA HVAC

DATA SERVER HEAT “TOP UP” HEAT

BOTANICAL DATA

EXTERIOR NATIVE PLANTING IRRIGATION

WATER TREATMENT PARK/GREENWAY

MARSHLAND

FEMA EVACUATION PATH

LARGER CITY AREA

CANAL

DATA CENTER

HEAT EXCHANGE

56

SUBWAY

WATERTANK

GALLERY

WIND POWER GENERATION

COMPOSITE VERTICAL FARM /PV PANEL

STUDIO

FACADE INTEGRATED WIND TURBINE

RESTAURANT

CONCEPT SKETCH

OFFICE

DATA AND WATER REMEDIATION

VERTICAL FARM FOOD PROCESSING

LIBRARY

(BOTANICAL GENETICS LAB)

WINTERGARDEN

WATER / DATA FLOW BUNDLE

VERTICAL REMEDIATION VERTICAL FARM FOOD PROCESSING

THE BUNDLE

FIBER OPTIC DATA CABLE AND WATER MICROPIPE

PRIVATE SKY GARDEN RESTAURANT

GREENWAY

LIBRARY

CONSTRUCTING PEDESTRIAN INFRASTRUCTURE COMPLYING TO FEMA GUIDLINES

(BOTANICAL GENETICS LAB)

WINTERGARDEN

RESIDENTIAL

GYM/SPA VERTICAL FARM FOOD PROCESSING

RETAILOFFICE LIBRARY

(BOTANICAL GENETICS LAB)

WINTERGARDEN

MEDIA GALLERY AND VERTICAL DISPLAY

OFFICE

FILM STUDIO

RESTAURANT

RESTAURANT

COMMUNITY SERVICE

STUDIO

DAYCARE KINDERGARTEN

MARSHLAND RESTORATION

SPORTS COMPLEX

INTEEPLAY OF SOFTEDGE AND HARDEDGE

WATER IN

GREENWAY

COOLING SYSTEM / SAND FILTERING

DATA CENTER

OURDOOR SPORTS AREA

SUBWAY PATHWAY

05.Program

57

06 PRECEDENT STUDY

[Seattle Olympic Sculpture Park , Weiss and Manfredi Architects]

Precedent Study

The following projects featured as architectural precedents inform the direction of our future proposal for our Gowanaissance towers. Newtown Creek provides an example of a highly successful infrastructural system which successfully expresses architectural and utilitarian beauty from infrastructural architecture. Landschaft Park demonstrates the importance of memory upon collective histories of industrialization and nature’s ability to reclaim urban industrial spaces. The spongepark provides site specific considerations and solutions for the Gowanus hydrology and community desires and needs. Lastly, the Seattle Olympic Sculpture Park provides an architectural precedent for what is possible in the development of the urban spaces at the base of our tower. How our megastructure interacts at street level in an urban scale is of extreme concern, the example of Weiss and Manfredi provides a highly nuanced and successful understanding of landform buildings.

As a tower typology, the supertall Lotte Tower in Seoul, South Korea provides a similar height with our tower. Additionally, our tower contains many programmatic similarities to that of the Lotte Tower, most importantly, the inclusion of a transit center and a plinth at the lower stories, creating an overall compositional balance. Norman Foster’s 30 St. Mary Axe provides unique understandings of high performance skins, including the structural strength of the diagrid and the thermal regulation provided by pressurized skin systems.

59

Newtown Creek Treatment Plant Ennead Architects other functional parts of the plant and lastly, the yelThe Newtown creek wastewater treatment lowish light is used to indicate the pedestrian walkcenter composes of stainless steel-clad digester eggs. ways.

The wastewater treatment center employs futuristic lighting on its exterior eggshells. At night, the complex is dramatically lit in different colors to indicate various stages of the wastewater treatment process.

The blue light identifies the main water treatment plant, as opposed to warm orange urban lights from the rest of the city. The bright white light indicates

[Newtown Creek Wastewater Treatment Plant Photo credit: Stefen Turner]

60

Landschaftspark Duisburg-Nord Latz + Partner history remained a major concern throughout the This park located in Germany embraces the in- design process. In a similar vein to Newtown creek, dustrial past of the area including both the damages the luminosity of the building at night reimagines nocaused by industrialization and the strange beauty of tions of architectural beauty. infrastructural architecture. While reusing the skeletal remains of industrial infrastructure, Latz + Partner transforms the social, environmental, and economic spirit of the parkspace in the connection of lowlying waterfront park, pedestrian promenades isolated for decades, and a railway park. Memory of the site’s

[Landschaftspark Duisburg-Nord, Latz + Partner]

06.Precedent Study

61

SpongePark dlandstudio Spongepark seeks to not only provide public access and park space along the Gowanus, but also to perform as a highly intelligent system of bioremediation and filtration for the stormwater runoff, which will continue to affect the canal post-Superfund. In the dlandstudio solution, not only will the increased permeable surfaces encourage groundwater retention, but a series of bioretention basins and cisterns will collect storm runoff and process the water through phytoremediation, or filtration through na-

62

tive wetland plantings. The Spongepark also utilizes water filtration through oysters in addition to three levels of wetland plantings. The retention basins are kept clear of detritus from gravel filtered street ends.

The nuanced combination of ecological development, phytoremediation, public space and cultural involvement make the Spongepark viable and welcomed by the Gowanus community.

[Spongepark , dlandstudio]

06.Precedent Study

63

Seattle Olympic Sculpture Park Weiss and Manfredi Architects The Lotte World Tower by Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates contains a porous city within the city.

The plinth at street level creates public programs for the capital city. The slender curvature of the tower evokes the aesthetic of Korean ceramic, porcelain, and calligraphic arts. Additionally, the glazed seam of the tower faces back to the ancient city of Seoul.

64

[Seattle Olympic Sculpture Park, Weiss and Manfredi Architects]

06.Precedent Study

65

CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK The Lotte World Tower by Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates contains a porous city within the city.

The plinth at street level creates public programs for the capital city. The slender curvature of the tower evokes the aesthetic of Korean ceramic, porcelain, and calligraphic arts. Additionally, the glazed seam of the tower faces back to the ancient city of Seoul.

66

[http://skyscrapercenter.com/building/lotte-world-tower/88, http://www.kpf.com/, Von Klemperer, James. “Urban Density and the Porous High-Rise: The Integration of the Tall Building in the City.� Urban Density and the Porous High-Rise: The Integration of the Tall Building in the City - from China to New York 4.2 (2015): 135-42. Council on Tall Buildings and the Urban Habitat. June 2015. Web. 14 Sept. 2015.]

06.Precedent Study

67

SITE STRATEGY TRANSPORTATION SYSTEMS Lotte World Tower features a major transportation hub. The tower interconnects an underground subway station, bus terminal, major roadway, and bicycle route.

68

Underground Bicycle Parking System

Underground Subway Path

Traffic Control and Operation Centers

Bus Transit Terminal

[http://skyscrapercenter.com/building/lotte-world-tower/88, http://www.kpf.com/, Von Klemperer, James. “Urban Density and the Porous High-Rise: The Integration of the Tall Building in the City.� Urban Density and the Porous High-Rise: The Integration of the Tall Building in the City - from China to New York 4.2 (2015): 135-42. Council on Tall Buildings and the Urban Habitat. June 2015. Web. 14 Sept. 2015.]

06.Precedent Study

69

PROGRAMMATIC SYSTEM Lotte World Tower features a myriad of programs.Within the plinth of the building, programs of retail space, concert hall, theater, and museum, draw the public to the supertall structure.

Within the tower exists, retail, medical, offices, office housing, hotel, event space, cafe, and an observation deck at the uppermost levels.

[ http://www.kpf.com/]

70

Level 123 OBSERVATION DECK Level 122 CAFE Level 121 OBSERVATION DECK Level 120 OBSERVATION DECK Level 117 GALLERY

Level 107 MEMBER’S RESTAURANT

Level 86 HOTEL POOL/FITNESS Level 81 HOTEL 3 MEAL RESTAURANT Level 79 HOTEL SKY LOBBY Level 76 HOTEL EVENT HALL

Level 42 OFFICETEL LOBBY

Level 31 OFFICE VIP LOUNGE

Level 19 LOUNGE

MEDICAL

EXHIBITION

REFRESHMENT

HOTEL

RETAIL

OFFICETEL

ENTERTAINMENT

OFFICE

06.Precedent Study

71

CIRCULATORY SYSTEM Lotte World Tower utilizes several elevator banks to reach certain program packages within the tower. The elevators stop at various floors with some elevators only operating between specific floors for security and convenience.

[ http://www.kpf.com/]

72

Level 123 OBSERVATION DECK Level 122 CAFE Level 121 OBSERVATION DECK Level 120 OBSERVATION DECK Level 117 GALLERY

Level 107 MEMBER’S MEMBER S RESTAURANT

Level 86 HOTEL POOL/FITNESS Level 81 HOTEL 3 MEAL RESTAURANT Level 79 HOTEL SKY LOBBY Level 76 HOTEL EVENT HALL

Level 42 OFFICETEL LOBBY

Level 31 OFFICE VIP LOUNGE

Level 19 LOUNGE

MECHANICAL LEVEL

06.Precedent Study

73

CIRCULATORY SYSTEM Lotte World Tower utilizes several elevator banks to reach certain program packages within the tower. The elevators stop at various floors with some elevators only operating between specific floors for security and convenience.

CLEARANCE 108 FT 50 FT CLEAR

1 FT WIDER THAN FIRE REGULATION

[ http://www.kpf.com/]

74

FIRESTAIR LAYOUT

HORIZONTAL SAFE ZONEE Level 102 Safe Zone

Level 83 Safe Zone

Level 60 Safe Zone

Level 40 Safe Zone

Level 22 Safe Zone

EVACUATION ON GROUNDD FLOORR

06.Precedent Study

75

STRUCTURAL SYSTEM The structural system of Lotte World Tower combines belt truss and outrigger systems holding the concrete core and megacolumns on the exterior

CUT-OFF WALL

to create a rigid structure.

[ http://www.kpf.com/]

76

Level 123 OBSERVATION DECK Level 122 CAFE Level 121 OBSERVATION DECK Level 120 OBSERVATION DECK Level 117 GALLERY

Level 107 MEMBER’S RESTAURANT

Level 86 HOTEL POOL/FITNESS Level 81 HOTEL 3 MEAL RESTAURANT Level 79 HOTEL SKY LOBBY Level 76 HOTEL EVENT HALL

BELT + OUTRIGGER TRUSS

BELT TRUSS

CONCRETE MEGA COLUMN Level 42 OFFICETEL LOBBY

STEEL PERIMETER COLUMN Level 31 OFFICE VIP LOUNGE

CONCRETE CORE Level 19 LOUNGE

CONCRETE MAT

06.Precedent Study

77

ENVIRONMENTAL ENERGY SYSTEMS Lotte World Tower features several environmental energy systems, the first being Han river water used for cycling cooling. Active geothermal buried beneath the tower, photovoltaic panels placed on the roof of the tower base, hydrogen fuel cell charging, and wind energy at the top of the tower.

[ http://www.kpf.com/]

78

WIND POWER GENERATION

BUILDING INTERGRATED PHOTOVOLTAICS

HEAT PUMP SYSTEM USING THE HAN-RIVER WATER

HYDROGEN BATTERY CELLS

GEOTHERMAL SYSTEM

06.Precedent Study

79

ENVELOPE/SKIN/SURFACE 30 St. Mary Axe by Foster + Partners features a pressurized skin system. This intelligent skin system takes advantage of the aerodynamic form of the tower, and making the most use of solar gain through active shading systems, passive pressurized ventilation, and daylighting. The synthesis of these systems results in an economical and ecologically sensitive design.

80

[http://www.fosterandpartners.com/projects/30-st-mary-axe/, http://skyscrapercenter.com/building/30-st-mary-axe/2369]

06.Precedent Study

81

07 MATERIAL

[http://materia.nl_ studying fish to design new materials from]

MATERIAL

Material is an integral component in designing a mega vertical tower. 0.01 pounds difference in building material can drastically impact structural composition in mega structures. In addition, this tower is omnipresent; therefore the exterior envelope could affect the entire urban area where the tower is present in the vision of the people. The ‘expressed’ building via material selection and composition predetermines the role and idea of the buildings.

For this project, we focus on selecting building materials that is lightweight to increase structural efficiency. In addition transparency is a key factor in material selection; transparent materials suggest openness and the cyan tinted exterior glazing system also creates very futuristic aura for a given structure, as if the tip of the skyscraper would merge into the sky. On the other hand, opaque and solid materials implies structural integrity; when these materials (concrete, steel, and carbon composites) are exposed on the exterior facade, the building expresses rigidity.

In addition, the composition of exoskeleton and the reflected inner structure is the mare beauty of a mega structures.

83

TYPE

PICTURE

MANUFACTURER/ARCHITECT

DESC

DIFFERENT TYPES OF GLASS

Low-E Glass

Insulating Glass

Laminated Glass

Ornilux Bird Protection Glass

Cardinal Glass Industries

PPG - Intercept Insulated Window Glass

Viracon

Hunsrücker Glasveredelung Wagener GmbH & Co. KG

Insulating glass is glass enclosing a air space. Inheren increases a windo performance by re or loss.

The principal featu safety glass is its impact. Although the glass fragmen bonded to the inte ability to penetrati minimizing the ris

The glass has a reflective coatin birds while rema parent to the hu

Glassfber Insulation

A translucent glass which enhances th ue) of U-profiled gl scatters incoming l space between the completely. offers s reduces solar heat in the summer.

Rivuletta

RIVULETTA® is a fine surface texture side. The structure view through the m while maintaining a transmission.

Wacosystems

84

Low-e coatings ha to minimize the am and infrared light glass without com of visible light that Reducing the emi window’s insulatin

Schott

CRIPTION

ave been developed mount of ultraviolet that can pass through mpromising the amount t is transmitted. issivity improves a ng properties.

s two or more plies of hermetically sealed ntly, insulating glass ow's thermal educing the heat gain

ure of laminated performance under the glass may break, nts remain firmly erlayer, reducing the ion the opening and k of injuries.

SPECIFICATION

:LWK LWV 6+*& RI MXVW /RĆœ greatly reduces oppressive solar heat gain and provides a very low U-Factor of 0.25 which reduces indoor heat loss. In addition, it delivers the lowest UV transmission

colorless flat glass with a e of parallel lines on one e of the glass distorts the material by refraction of light, a high amount of light

Varies

SOURCE

Cardinal Corp

The Intercept Spacer System uses either tin-plated steel or stainless steel because it is stronger and more durable than foam and they provide excellent thermal performance.

Sandwiched between two PPG Low-E glass, argon gas is passed through.

Varies

PPG Glass Technology

Ideal for acoustic, aesthetic, blastmitigating, hurrican resistant, safety, and UV protection factors. Laminated glass also offers a greater availability of coatings than monolithic glass. The interlayers used in laminated glass are available in a variety of colors and opacities.

Varies

Viracon

a patterned, UV ng making it visible to aining virtually transuman eye.

s fiber insulation material, he heat insulation (U-valass facade systems. It light nicely and fills the e double glazing unit sun protection because it t penetrating the window

PROGRAM USE

Due to the effect of scattering light, even deep rooms can be illuminated evenly, without blending and shading. TIMax GL is UV-stable, temperature resistant up to 100°C and insensitive to humidity.

Residential

http://materia.nl/

Residential

http://materia.nl/

Residential

http://www.us.schott.com/english/index.html

07.a. Material

85

TYPE

PICTURE

MANUFACTURER/ARCHITECT

DESC

GREEN WALL SYSTEMS

Vertical Gardening

Green Facades

Floating Planter System

3D Trellis System

Green Wall Panel

86

Vo Trong Njhia’s Babylon Hotel

One Central Park, Austrailia John Nouvel & Patrick Blanc

GSky Basic Wall System

Tournesol Siteworks VertiGreen 3D Modular Trellis Panels

Plants are gro louvers that a facade

23 green walls There are 250 species of Aus plants.

Made up of a fl container) syste vines over a bu risking damage and having to w

Facades can be can keep vines areas and can glazed areas, a to provide seas interior spaces.

Panelized gree able to be com

Creabeton Materieaux, Skyflor

CRIPTION

SPECIFICATION

own on vertical concrete Louvers support the trees and vines re surrounding the that grow. It shelters the interior from the sun and contains either openings for balconies or curtain wall behind to protect from the exterior

s with 35,200 plants.

0 different types of strailian flowers and

oating planter (vine em that safely trains uilding facade without e to a building’s facade wait.

e vine covered. Trellises s largely within designed be placed in front of allowing deciduous vines sonal shading of the .

en wall system, modular bined with glazing systems

There are floor to ceiling glass with green walls intermittenly. It creates a musical composition on the facade with vines and foliage that spring out between floors and provide a frame for the building

Our system can provide wall coverage with vines in 1/10 the time of traditional vine trellis systems. The system is comprised of 5 main components: customizable containers, insulated containers, maintenance, remote monitored irrigation system, and a wall mounting system

A rigid, commercial-grade 3-dimension trellis system that features two different grid sizes. The modular trellis will support and protect robust foliage growth, whether attached to a wall or hung between posts as a “green” fence.

The durable panels are given an extra coating of zinc prior to powder coating to resist rust and corrosion over time.

Applications: Rear-ventilated facade or soundproofing wall for new buildings or renovation Module sizes available: Width: 60 – 300 cm; height: 60 – 180 cm Thickness of modules: 13.5 cm (without fastening) Weight: Approx. 200kg / m2 (after watering)(airborne sound insulation EN ISO 717-1, EN ISO 10140 (>40 dB)/ sound absorption EN 1793-1, group A2/A3;)

PROGRAM USE

Any use

Any use

SOURCE

http://www.dezeen .com/2015/08/03/ vo-trong-nghianaman-retreatbabylon-hotelbuilding-hanginggardens-facadesgreen-wallsvietnam/

http://www.arch daily.com/551329 /one-central-park -jean-nouvelpatrick-blanc

Exterior

GSky Plant Systems, Inc

Exterior

Tournesol Siteworks

Public

Frederic Haesevoets Architecture

07.a. Material

87

Curtainwall Integrated Photovoltaics Smith + Gill Architects, Federation of Korean Industries Tower As the name suggests, the solar photovoltaic panel is integrated into the building fabric rather than a 'tack-on' addition. The PV panel replaces conventional building cladding materials with a multifunctional building material. By replacing cladding with BIPV, construction costs can be significantly reduced.

It cleverly allows for angled building integrated photovoltaics (BIPVs) in the spandrel panels on the southwest and northwest sides, which receive the most sunlight. This maximizes energy collection along the surface of the tower, while also limiting heat gain through the vision glass below. By angling the spandrel panels 30 degrees toward the sun, the amount of energy collected by the photovoltaic panels is maximized. Below the spandrel panels, the vision panels are angled 15 degrees toward the ground, minimizing the amount of direct sun radiation and glare, thus reducing cooling loads.

BIPV S-Energy, Korea

Secured stability with PVB Film • PVB Film is used for laminated glas buildings as it has a higher heat and m resistance as well as a superior adhe than EVA film • Excellent insulation, durability, loadi moisture resistance

88

ELEVATION: PROGRAM:

500’-0” COMMERCIAL/OFFICE

CONCERNS: MAXIMIZING LIGHT, MINIMIZING LOW ANGLE SUN + HEAT GAIN

EAST/WEST

s of high-rise moisture esive strength

ng, heat and

sources: http://www.s-energy.co.kr/main.php?emobile=em22 http://www.world-architects.com/en/projects/47750_FKI_Tower http://smithgill.com/news/arch_newspaper_11_feb_10/

07.b. Facade Study

89

G. James Glass & Aluminum: 851-500 Series 200mm Double Glazed System

In response to the Center for Architecture’s competition “Open Call: Innovative Curtain Wall Design,” Adaptive Building Initiative teamed up with Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill, and the Permasteelisa Group to create the HelioTrace façade concept.

The goal of this collaboration was to develop an advanced building enclosure prototype that could leverage contextual, environmental inputs to inform a responsive kinetic curtain wall system. Architects and enclosure experts at SOM envisioned a configuration that improves the wall’s performance relative to daylighting and glare, and that reduces solar heat gain by as much as 81%. The kinetic shading system was developed and integrated into the overall façade by the Adaptive Building Initiative, utilizing its patented Strata™ system. sources: adaptive buildings initiative | http://www.adaptivebuildings.com/heliotrace.html G. James Glass + Aluminum

90

ELEVATION: PROGRAM:

1,000’-0” RESIDENTIAL/HOTEL

CONCERNS: MAINTAINING OPERABILITY WITH HIGH WIND SPEEDS

EAST/WEST

07.b. Facade Study

91

08 CORE STUDY

[alphabetictower]

Core Study Trusses make me happy

Core study includes building layout studies for different building foor print for high-rise buildings and structural layout.

93

CAPACITY (Ō²)

OCCUPANCY

GRID

LAYOUT RULESET: 5' x 5'

A. SQUARE

B. RECTANGLE C. LONG RECTANGLE

CORRIDOR(Ō²) EGRASS RULESET: RULESET: NO DEAD END -150' APART MAX CORRIDORS WITH 75' PATH -200' MAX FROM REMOTEST PART

50

10,000

100

15,000

150

20,000

200

30,000

300

40,000

400

A1 A2 A3 B1 B2 B3 C1 C2 C3 D1 D2 D3 E1 E2 E3 E4 F1 F2 F3

1 0 0 0 1 0 1 1 1 2 1 1 1 3 3 2 1 2 3

0 1 0 1 0 2 2 2 2 0 2 3 2 3 3 4 3 2 5

0 0 1 1 1 0 0 0 0 2 1 0 3 0 0 0 4 0 0

900 2175 1200 1300 1950 1150 1750 2075 1575 3300 3500 3500 5700 5470 6350 4700 10875 8115 7000

VERTICA

A. FOUR FIX B. SIX FIX

RULESET: 1 ELEVATOR PER 50 O MIN 2 IN A PACKAGE

C. EIGHT FIX A. DOUBLE

DN

DN

94

5,000

BATHROOM RULESET: BASED ON ICC OCCUPANCY B 403.1

2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 3 4 3 5 5 5 4 6 5 6

1 1 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 2 0 1 1 3 0 0 0

0 0 0 1 1 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 2 0 0 0 2 2 0

0 0 0 0 0 0 1 1 1 1 1 0 0 1 1 0 1 1 2

1 1 1 1 1 1 0 0 0 0 2 2 2 1 1 3 2 2 2

B. TR

L CIRCULATION

SERVICES RULESET: 1 UNIT PER 150 OCCUPANTS

CCUPANTS

RIPLE

0 0 0 0 0 0 1 1 1 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 0

C. QUADRUPLE

0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 1 1 0 1 1 1

MEP RULESET: 1 PER 50 OCCUPANTS

A.DOUBLE

1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 2 2 2 3 3 3 2 3 6 2

0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 2 2 2 2 1 1 3 3 4 4

FIRE TOWER MAX TRAVEL DISTANCE RULESET: (EGRASS) 1 PER 200 (Ō) OCCUPANTS

BUILDING PERIMETER (Ō)

TOTAL AREA (Ō²)

OCCIPIED AREA/ TOTAL AREA PERCENTAGE

DAYLIGHT PERCENTAGE

410 420 510 690 700 550 740 910 740 1090 870 1030 1290 1230 1320 1590 1790 1380 1620

8325 9800 8775 14000 14575 14175 19900 20300 19625 27250 27750 27825 42025 41750 43050 40325 58900 54575 54300

60% 51% 57% 71% 69% 71% 75% 74% 76% 73% 72% 72% 71% 72% 70% 74% 68% 73% 74%

80% 85% 97% 88% 85% 80% 85% 78% 75% 80% 72% 75% 80% 78% 82% 75% 82% 80% 72%

B.TRIPLE

1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 0 0 0 1 2 2 0 1 0 0

1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 2 2 2

138 112 185 127 117 122 133 114 140 156 120 141 149 135 141 148 181 129 148

NATURAL LIGHTING SOLAR CLAZING

08.Core Study

95

A Occup Longes

Area: 5,00 Occupancy: 50 Longest Dista 96

A1:

rea: 5,000 sq. ft. pancy: 50 people st Distance: 103’

A3: Area: 5,000 sq. ft.

Occupancy: 50 people Longest Distance: 87’

A2:

00 sq. ft.

0 people ance: 81’ 08.Core Study

97

B1: Area: 10,000 sq. ft.

Occupancy: 100 people Longest Distance: 122’

Occ Lo 98

B Area: 10,000 sq Occupancy: 100 peo Longest Distance: 1

B3:

Area: 10,000 sq. ft. cupancy: 100 people ongest Distance: 124’ 08.Core Study

99

C1: Area: 15,000 sq. ft.

Occupancy: 150 people Longest Distance: 138’

100

C2: Area: 15,000 sq. ft.

Occupancy: 150 people Longest Distance: 115’

C3: Area: 15,000 sq. ft.

Occupancy: 150 people Longest Distance: 87’

08.Core Study

101

D1: Area: 20,000 sq. ft.

Occupancy: 200 people Longest Distance: 96’

D3:

102

Area: 20,000 sq. ft.

Occupancy: 200 people Longest Distance: 133’

D2: Area: 20,000 sq. ft.

Occupancy: 200 people Longest Distance: 116’

08.Core Study

103

E1: Area: 30,000 sq. ft.

Occupancy: 300 people Longest Distance: 156’

104

E2: Area: 30,000 sq. ft.

Occupancy: 300 people Longest Distance: 142’ 08.Core Study

105

F1: Area: 40,000 sq. ft.

Occupancy: 400 people Longest Distance: 108’

O Lo 106

F2:

Area: 40,000 sq. ft. ccupancy: 400 people ongest Distance: 111’ 08.Core Study

107

E3: BELT TRUSS PLAN

E3: STRUCTURAL FRAMING PLAN

108

E3: AREAS OF REFUGE

E3: MECHANICAL PLAN

08.Core Study

109

E3: OVERALL STRUCTURE

E3: BELT TRUSS, SHEAR WALLS, AND MEGACOLUMNS 110

E3: COMPRESSION FLOORS(ABOVE), TENSION FLOORS(BELOW)

08.Core Study

111

DN DNN

DN

DNN

DNN

OP A1 separate core tower

112

OP A2 ng g / double ble facade maximize solar gazing

DN DNN DNN

DN

e effect with corridor do or

OP A3 linear corridor corrid and maximize imize open office perimeter perim

08.Core Study

113

DNN

DN

DNN DNN

114

OP B1 irccu atio from other services separate central circulation

OP B2 separate central circulation

ve el distance d minimize travel

create two different office s

DN

DNN DNN

DN DNN

from other er services

OP B3 maximize solar exposure

paces

simplest circulation path

08.Core Study

115

DNN

DNN

DNN

DN DNN

OP C1 C ze travel tr minimize distance centralized

116

OP C2 Equalize solar la ar exposure ge em diagonal arrangement

DNN DNN

DNN

DN

OP PC C3 lize solar exposure Equalize circula simplest circulation path

117

DNN

DNN DNN

OP D1 OP courtyard rtya condition co

DNN DNN DN

OP D2 separate residential

118

DNN

DNN

DNN

DNN

DNN

DN DNN

OP D3 3 two systems

08.Core Study

119

DNN DNN DNN

DNN

DN

DN

OP E1 ON NG UNITS IT TS (RESIDENTIAL) SEPARATE LONG DISTRIBUTED ED MEP AND DE ELEVATOR SYSTEM YST TE ER FIRE S SYSTEM IN THE CENTER

120

DNN

DN

DNN

DNN DN DNN

OP E2 ST TEM(CORE WITH M HYBRID SYSTEM(CORE MAIN CIRCULATION AND BATHROOM) DISTRIBUTED MEP SYSTEM FIRE SYSTEM ON THE PERIPHERY NO NATURAL LIGHTING IN THE CORRIDOR

08.Core Study

121

DN

DN

DNN DNN DN

DN

OP E3 HYBRID SYSTEM(CORE WITH MAIN CIRCULATION AND BATHROOM) DISTRIBUTED MEP SYSTEM FIRE SYSTEM ON THE PERIPHERY ATRIUM FOR DISTRIBUTION OF LIGHT

122

DN DN

DN

DN

DN

OP P E3 MAXIMIZE ARRANGEMENT) XIMIZE PERIMETER (LINEAR A 3 SEPARATE R T TOWERS RA DISTRIBUTED ELEVATOR / BATHROOM SYSTEM D MEP / ELE FIRE SYSTEM ON THE PERIPHERY

08.Core Study

123

DNN DNN

DNN DN

DN

OP F1 SEPARATE LONG UNITS (RES SEP P SEPARATE CENTRAL TOWER DISTRIBUTE MEP AND ELEVAT

DN

DN DNN

DNN

DNN

DNN

OP F2 CENTRALIZED COURTYARD CONDITION IZE SYSTEM WITH C O DISTRIBUTED M MEP SYSTEM FIRE SYSTEM ON THE PERIPHERY AND CENTER

124

DNN

DNN

DNN DN

IDENTIAL) DE ENTIAL)

DNN

TOR SYSTEM

DN

DNN

DNN

DN

DNN DN

DNN

OP P F3 XIMIZE PERIMETER (LINEAR A MAXIMIZE ARRANGEMENT) 3 SEPARATE R T TOWERS RA DISTRIBUTED ELEVATOR / BATHROOM SYSTEM D MEP / EL LE FIRE SYSTEM ON THE PERIPHERY

08.Core Study

125

DN DN DN

OP E3. STRUCTURAL PLAN 126

DN

DDNN DN DN

BELT TRUSS MEGA COLUMN

08.Core Study

127

DDNN DN DN

DN DN

OP E3. STRUCTURAL PLAN 128

DN DN

DN DN

BELT TRUSS MEGA COLUMN REGULAR COLUMN REGULAR COLUMN GRID

08.Core Study

129

DN DN DN

OP E3. STRUCTURAL PLAN 130

DN

DDNN DN DN

BELT TRUSS AREA OF REFUGE

08.Core Study

131

OVERVIEW

COMPRESSION FLOORS

132

STRUCTURAL ELEMENTS

TENSION FLOORS

08.Core Study

133

Annotated Bibliography Sorrel Anderson

Tzonis, Alexander. “The Hopeless Arcadia.” In Towards

consider the consequences of their choices. Though Tzonis may be correct in his claim that current architecture is merely a reflection of the society in which

a Non-oppressive Environment; an Essay. Boston: [i Press; Distributed by G. Braziller, New York], 1972.

it is designed, but architecture may yet serve as a catalyst for social change nonetheless.

Alexander Tzonis’ concluding chapter, “The Hopeless Arcadia,” addresses the challenges of designing a utopian architecture. Tzonis critiques the efforts of Le Courbusier and other utopian architectural proposals, claiming these options remain just as dictatorial as the cultures in which they are created. (Tzonis, 109) These utopian suggestions, “become just another ‘choice’ in the existing market of consumer goods of the utilitarian environment –as dull, rigid, aggressive, and oppressive as any other.” He claims these so called solutions are just as didactic as our consumerist society, and are equally disappointing alternatives to a restrictive modern society. Though Tzonis acknowledges utopian ideals as a form of dissent and critique in response to unsatisfying social conditions, he argues that theory and design lack the power to create a truly Arcadian society. According to Tzonis, a non-oppressive social organization must be in place, before architecture and theory can follow.

What remains most interesting about Tzonis’ piece is his discussion of the failings of utopia. The question of whether architecture can accomplish social, economic, and political change, while seemingly dubious, challenges and encourages architects to 134

Sullivan, Louis. “The Tall Office Building Artistically Considered.” Lippincott’s Magazine, March 1, 1896.

Louis Sullivan’s pivotal essay delineates a brand new building typology created by the marriage of Chicago steel and the New York invention of the elevator. He describes the new skyscraper as an object that is “lofty…thrilling… soaring… [and] proud.” These terms used to describe the aspirations of the skyscraper reveal his aspirations for his newly created tall typology. Sullivan urges that the skyscraper must be an object of natural beauty rather than a “sterile pile, this crude, harsh, brutal agglomeration” (Sullivan, 1) that is typical office buildings.

Sullivan operates under many assumptions in his justification of skyscrapers. Including that,“offices are necessary for the transaction of business.” (Sullivan, 1)The assumption that a capitalist economy and big business would be a permanent economic system in the US and would need a new building typology is central to Sullivan’s argument. Sullivan also asserts that within every problem the solution is hidden within. This adamant belief that issues have natural and simple solutions cultivates Sullivan’s later

claims that architectural “form ever follows function.” (Sullivan, 5) Sullivan argues that spatial and architectural decisions are simply determined by the programmatic use and atmosphere intended within a space. Simply put, that a structural module is determined by typical office dimensions, that a lobby level must be more spacious and sumptuous than upper floors, and that this differing spatiality must be expressed in the apertures and ornament upon the façade.

Central to Sullivan’s essay is his concern with “trained” architects losing the modern intent of the typology. He seems to fear historicism that would inevitably arise when skyscrapers are built by archi-

property and profitability. The verticality of the tall building stems from greed and excess rather than any kind of lofty ideals, despite the claims of Sullivan.

He goes further to reject the existing towers of the time for their monotony, “they no longer startle or amuse. Verticality is already stale; vertigo has given way to nausea.” (Wright,179) Wright claims that the increasing verticalization within American cities, while seeking to resolve issues of urban congestion, actually aggravate it even further.

Much of Wright’s arguments about the agenda of the skyscraper, capital, and excess are very evident. His critique of the typology that his mentor Louis Sullivan helped to create nonetheless shares

tects who have been practicing for a while. Sullivan’s rejection of historicism results from the danger that past styles imposed upon these buildings would weigh skyscrapers down with historical elements and ornament.

The main weakness of Sullivan’s approach is the exclusive emphasis on the typical office module. However, had Sullivan proposed a more radical building typology, perhaps his ideas would have been regarded as mere fancy rather than a serious proposal for the modern American city.

some key points with Sullivan. The skyscraper typology is in danger of creating problems it hopes to be resolving additionally, the vertical typology must not attempt to revive or reiterate past historical styles, the new skyscraper must be entirely its own.

Wright, Frank Lloyd. “The Tyranny of the Skyscraper” In: The Future of Architecture. New York: Horizon Press, 1953.

Frank Lloyd Wright’s lecture entitled “The Tyranny of the Skyscraper” critiques the emergence of the skyscraper, the obsession with verticality in general, and the congestion of the metropolis.

Wright considers American cities to suffer from “metropolitan misery,” with the skyscraper serving as a symbolic and physical manifestation catastrophic extent of modern mechanization on an urban scale.

Quite accurately he condemns the skyscraper as a typology used primarily for the optimization of space,

Frampton, Kenneth. “Towards a Critical Regionalism: Six Points for an Architecture of Resistance.” In The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, edited

by Hal Foster, 16-30. Bay Press, 1983.

Kenneth Frampton’s “Towards a Critical Regionalism” comments on the problematic nature of placeless modern architecture, but also warns against the kitsch of complete vernacular architecture. With the rise of megacities defined by the existence of “the free standing skyscraper and the serpentine highway,” universalization in architecture and urban form is nearing monotony and futility.

Frampton traces historical architectural movements in opposition to universalization, such as the gothic revival, the arts-and-crafts movement, and futurism.

These avant-garde movements sought to react to lifeless modernization which lack topography, light, and local cultural history. Frampton argues that the solution to the problems of universalization can be 09.Annotated Bibliography 135

found in maintaining the ideas of Critical Regionalism.

Critical regionalism is a term Frampton borrows from Alexander Tzonis and Liane Lefaivre and refers to the practice of architecture rooted in an awareness of regional culture, both socially and architecturally. Frampton suggests Critical Regionalism “as a cultural strategy is as much a bearer of world culture as it is a vehicle of universal civilization.”

(Frampton,21) The movement provides practitioners with a means of producing an architecture that is self-aware and understanding of its geographic and cultural context. Additionally, Frampton implies that placelessness is dangerous for culture and architec-

rarely serves as anything more than mere surface application. In fact, according to Allen, architecture operates at a temporal scale that is between the biological scale of the body and the geological scale of topography. Allen states that “architecture is situated between the biological and the geological- slower than living beings but faster than the underlying geology.” (Allen, 22)Thinking of architecture in terms of temporality allows for fascinating perspectives that go beyond the spatial tracing and binding of architecture as a fundamental human act.

Allen’s chief intention with this essay is to introduce an urban architecture that operates on a geological scale. Within this temporal scale, quicker than true

ture. Topography and light naturally ground architecture in a way that gives architectural opportunities and charm, which, when missing, creates lifeless space.

Similar to Wright and Sullivan, Frampton critiques the creation of a problem for the sake of solving a problem. He states that the impetus for many modernist solutions, “the in order to, has become… the ‘for the sake of’… generat[ing] meaninglessness.” It seems as though both Wright and Frampton passionately reject movements of senselessness and excess for the mere sake of progress. Architecture must be rooted and critical of its place in a socio-political and topographic context.

geological temporality, Allen presents the typology of the landform building as a reaction and improvement upon the static field operations of previous landscape architecture and urbanism.

Allen defines the landform building in terms of seven working concepts. First, it “trusts in the compact… to absorb and transform new potentials of landscape.”

Secondly, the “landform building is less interested in the imitation of natural form [and] more interested in new programmatic possibilities that are opened up by… artificial terrains.” Thirdly, and perhaps most importantly for our purposes, landform buildings, “go beyond the single surface typologies of the 1990s…[and] work with complex formations that accept both the horizontal and the vertical.” (Allen, 34) The landform building serves as a new means of translating urban, sustainable, and landscape concerns within megastructures. The landform building confronts these issues, loading the architecture and site with possibilities and opportunities to redefine landscape architecture as a fully integrated discipline. When the practice of landscape, architecture, and urbanism are working in synthesis, truly successful landform buildings can arise.

Easterling, Keller. “Zone: The Spatial Softwares of Extrastatecraft.” Places Journal. Accessed December 11,

Allen, Stan. “From the Biological to the Geological.”

In Landform Building: Architecture’s New Terrain.

Baden, Switzerland: Lars Müller Publishers;, 2011.

Stan Allen challenges the “working metaphor” of biomimicry within the recent architectural field in his book, Landform Building: Architecture’s New Terrain.

Allen asserts that “the desire to make architecture more lifelike” is unwise, because architecture does not operate at the temporal scale of the biological.

(Allen, 20) As an architectural strategy, biomimicry 136

2015. https://placesjournal.org/article/zone-the-spatial-softwares-of-extrastatecraft/.

Keller Easterling traces the history of Free Trade Zones, which exist as urban spaces established outside of state control. Easterling critiques the establishment of such Trade Zones free of tariffs and regulation as sub-par ways of investing in economically undeveloped nations. Easterling argues that simply investing in infrastructure in the first place, while more expensive is a much more effective means of developing third world economies. Additionally, she presents the issue of Free Trade Zones and certain science and industrial parks which are free from environmental regulation. Gigantic private companies investing in infrastructructure like “Mitsubishi, Kawasaki, Siemens,” etc. create infrastructural monopolies working as, “modern day counterparts of the “British and Dutch East India Companies of the early modern era.”

Frampton, Kenneth. “Megaform as Urban Landscape.”

Ann Arbor, Mich.: University of Michigan, A. Alfred Taubman College of Architecture Urban Planning, 1999.

Allen, Stan. “Infrastructural Urbanism.” SCIArc Media Archive. Accessed November 11, 2015. http://sma. sciarc.edu/video/stan-allen/.

In Stan Allen’s exploration into the interrelated nature of urbanism and infrastructure, he explores the correlation between postmodernism in architecture and the massive defunding of infrastructure in the United States. Allen argues that the postmodern movement in architecture allowed architects to exclude themselves in the planning and design of infrastructural and, by extension, urban systems. Because of the distance between architects and physical infrastructure created by the immaterial practice of drawing, “operating upon reality at a distance.” Allen believes that when architects re-associate themselves with the material workings of urban systems. He concludes with seven propositions about infrastructural urbanism and the possibilities for the future of urban architectural intervention and infrastructure.

Kenneth Frampton delineates a new typology for the megacity, modern expansive cities created by the advent of the automobile. Through a historical tracing of various qualifying buildings and masterplans for the megalopolis including the Bakema Plan for Amsterdam and Yokohama Port Terminal. Frampton ends his piece with a delineation of ten points which define the Megaform typology. Firstly, that megalopoli resulted from the invention of automobile culture. Frampton also discusses the “quintessential horizontality” of the megaform oftentimes almost fully integrating itself into the site like in the case of Seattle Olympic Sculpture Park by Weiss and Manfredi.

09.Annotated Bibliography

137

Annotated Bibliography Min Y. Hong

Sullivan, Louis H. “The Tall Office Building Artistically Considered.” Lippincott’s Magazine, March 1, 1896.

In this article, Louis H. Sullivan examines the inherent characteristics of tall buildings and the solution to some of the problems faced by tall buildings. In particular, he is not looking for a specific condition or idea of a buildings, but the very fundamental common qualities shared by tall buildings and the universal solution applicable to all of them. He asserts that there is indisputable need for tall buildings nowadays. However, asides from the materialistic conditions, tall buildings innate seemingly contrasting ideals: the vertical and resting life, the stark construction and peaceful sentiment. Sullivan insists that “it is of the very essence of every problem that it contains and suggests its own solution”. In search for the solution, he first defines the chief characteristics of the tall office buildings as ‘loftiness’. Moreover, he asserts that the one who designs those buildings ‘must live his life and for his life in the fullest, most consummate sense’.

Lastly, the most comprehensive solution will be letting the problem itself dissolve. Sullivan defines how some critics and theorizers create prototypes for tall office buildings. First, some argue that the tall building is a monotonous and uninterrupted series of office tires which represents the zenith power 138

and luxuriance. Others suggest that there is trinity in unity within tall office buildings. This idea of trinity derives from different idea: beginning, middle, and the ending from logical statement / roots, trunk, and tuft from organic forms / sometimes even just from the mysticism of the number three. Another group of theorists argues that the power of tall office buildings come from the unit, the Minerva, a singleness.

However, according to Sullivan ‘all of those critics and theorists agree [that] the tall office building should not, must not, be made a field for the display of architectural knowledge in the encyclopedic sense’. in addition, he argues that ‘all things in nature have a shape, a form, an outward semblance… and it is the pervading law of all things organic and inorganic [that] form ever follows function”.

Foster, Hal, and Kenneth Frampton. “Towards a Critical Regionalism: Six Points for an Architecture of Resistance.” In The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, 16-30. New York: New Press, 1988.

Frampton in his essay criticizes the highly polarized architectural practice between the high-tech approach and the provision of a “compensatory façade”, covering up the realities of universal system, of his own contemporary. He argues that there used to be a interplay between the civilization and culture to maintain the control over formation of urban fabric.

However, once the universal civilization won over the locally inflected culture, this balance was destroyed.

There was the Avant-Garde which affected both society and architecture in various ways during the modernization. However, later on avant-gardism was no longer a liberating movement because, partially, “its initial utopian promise has been overrun by the internal rationality of instrumental reason”. Frampton suggest the need for introduction of critical regionalism to mediate the domination of universal civilization. Critical regionalism employs elements derived indirectly from the peculiarities of a particular space.

Unsurprisingly, critical regionalism naturally involves

nature to the abstract, feelings and the mind of the man. Kant argues that both the mathematical sublime, which deals with the infinity, and the dynamic sublime, which deals with the contemplation of terrifying and powerful scenes, “therefore, [do] not reside in any of the things of nature, but only in our own mind, insofar as we may become conscious of our superiority over nature within, and thus also over nature without us” .

a close relation with nature: topography, context, climate, and light. Yet, critical regionalism does not resides in its scenographic qualities but bases its architectural autonomy in the tectonic, the syntactical and structural poetic resisting the gravity, the natural force.

had a part of nature in its quality as the “creation of an artificial horizon, a completely man-made substitute for the geology of mountains, cliffs, and canyons (91)”.

Nye also brings up the concept of electric cityscape.

“This vibrant landscape was the product of uncoordinated individual decisions, yet it had a collective effect – a kinetic impact – … the myriad lights produced a lively landscape … the electrified city was something fundamentally new, an unintended sublimity (173)”. The electrified landscape brought in an utterly different concept of sublime. Electrical sublime is not just a variation of a geometrical sublime because there is no typical spatial relationships, such as depth, perspective, or ordinary relationships between the objects. Even though the electrical sublime has totally different characteristics from the other sublimity, they still share the quality which leaves an observer a feeling of inferiority and insignificance before the immense power of its being.

Nye, David E. “American Technological Sublime.” Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1996.

In his writing, David E. Nye discusses the idea of ‘sublime’ from its origin, development and application in contemporary society. The idea of sublime started to emerge in 18th century European culture; Painters, writers, and philosophers believe in the sublime quality in vast bodies of Nature. They believed that the sublime experience primarily comes from the nature not the rhetorical sublime. The idea of sublime was revaluated when Edmund Burke established a contrast between the beautiful and the sublime, the sublime associated with terror which filled one’s mind completely. Later, Immanuel Kant, a German philosopher, in his essay Critique of Judgement, distinguishes sublime experience into two forms: the mathematical and the dynamic sublime. After all, the main concept of sublime shifts from vastness of the

In 19th century, the geometrical sublime rises with the construction of railroads and bridges after the industrial breakthrough across the west. Yet, the technologically advanced creation of sublime also

Bartolacci, James. “Rewind: Modernist Dreams Of Utopian Architecture.” Architizer. August 26, 2013.

Bartolacci, James. “Utopian Architecture Part 2: Beyond Modernism.” Architizer. September 4, 2013.

09.Annotated Bibliography

139

James Bartolacci in his consecutive articles, discusses the idea and vision of utopia throughout different time period and different means. He marks the beginning of architectural utopia vision from the futurist drafting of the envisioned world. Bartolacci also marks the highlight of utopian vision as a new material is introduced into architecture: the glass.

He also examines the soviet constructivists’ visionary drawings. He argues that the drawings remained at highly conceptual level, especially for the USSR thinkers because of their limited resources at the time. Yet, this elevated the drawing to reach certain level of abstraction and dogmatic expressions.

He then closely examined the drawings of ‘the master’ Le Corbusier. Bartolacci criticizes Le Corbusier’s utopian vision because “[his] utopian ideals were entrenched in colonial thinking—the civilized European designing to better the non-West—and typically benefited upper classes”.

Bartolacci consistently argues throughout the article that “while each architect’s ideals varied, they all held one thing in common: they could never be built.”

In the second article, Bartolacci talks about 3 more projects that encompass modernist grand visions of Utopia. He first visits the creator of “arcology”, Paulo Soleri. Soleri developed this utopian concept for architecture fused with ecology. The second group the Archigram, who “renewed interest in technology with an unrestrained and sometimes senseless program to keep modernism from further inching towards a banal and safe reality. [Their] buildings were excitingly playful, hyper-consumerist, and technologically driven, largely as a means to reinvigorate the profession.” The last one is an individual who created provocative drawings that were unbound by the influence of traditional rules of architecture and nature: Lebbeus Woods. “[For him], utopia existed more in freeing the mind from the physical and psychological constraints of society—a revolutionary 140

concept that boldly disrupted the modernist need to rationalize, classify, and make sense of the world around.”

09.Annotated Bibliography

141

142