Designed in partnership with William Brian Smith, GSAPP MArch.
We propose a structure consisting of 41 platforms elevated above Hunters Point South. Residences are built on top of these platforms, and platforms are organized to allow daylight at all levels. The 41 platforms are designed to collectively accomodate approximately 1,600 rental units of varying typologies.
Every 12 years each platform is "erased" - its architecture completely removed - and then left fallow for one year. This process is staggered, so that in any given year a given percentage of the total platforms lie empty.
Though the architecture on each platform is evanescent, the infrastructure that nourishes this architecture abides all acts of erasure. Dispersed Mechanical / Electrical / Plumbing shafts cycle air, water, sewage, and information in and out of each unit, while structural elevator shafts do the same with inhabitants.
These shafts are the only part of the building touching the ground, the only recognizable elements after each 13 year cycle, and made of the only "permanent" material - concrete - likely to be found in the structure.
Confronted with the inevitable crisis of its erasure, architecture is forced to adapt. A preemptive architecture emerges, one without pretensions of permanence, and so one that is able to turn the event of erasure into the anticipation of a fresh rebuilding: breaking-down to breakthrough.
Without “permanent” architecture, notions of acquired authenticity and hierarchies of generational housing become irrelevant. Over time the repetition of erasure generates a methodical architectural evolution, the cycle of removal nurturing each new generation of housing — biological architecture in all but aesthetic. When a unit is disassembled after 12 years, its greatest heritage will be the opportunity afforded by its absence.
Platform housing strives to combine the amenities and views of high-rise living with the pace and community of low-rise living. The conflation of these two states of living allows the platform to contain a variety of types – detached, semi-detached, row housing, party-wall housing – that shelter a full range of stakeholders.
Platforms combine the high-rise lobby and low-rise yard into one large public field at ground level, and into shared public spaces connected by elevators on each platform. By disrupting the normal progression from public to private, this change recontextualizes the act of living and relating to one's neighbors.
The looming psychological inevitability of erasure produces communities that live differently in time. Formed with an inceptive recognition of physical impermanence, platform communities are literally uprooted from the Earth. They exist in a constantly changing relationship with their own spatial organization, engendering spaces of poignancy, fragility, and fleeting beauty.
Are such communities the product of their spatial organization, as are most urban communities, or are they disassociated from such influences? Will platform communities persist and rebuild together after erasure, or vanish with their architecture?
The answer to either one of these questions answers the other. In an era of often immaterial social relationships, platform communities find meaning — good or bad — in their physical substance.
The site for this structure — Hunters Point South — is itself physically comprised of the evidence of architectural impermanence. First a quiet middle-class residential neighborhood, then a densely occupied industrial site, then a tabula rasa for the city’s avant-garde artists, today Hunters Point South is Long Island City’s architectural graveyard, a dumping ground for local construction contractors and a “planned zoning district” with a nebulous future.
Yet despite its apparent emptiness, Hunters Point South is not characterless. Indeed, it is a place filled with the absence of architecture, a place where sensations of erasure and neglect overpower any sensations produced by the architecture encountered nearby. Hunters Point South communicates, in its emptiness, the sensation of settlement; the exhilaration of progress. Shrubs and rubble displaced by yews and fresh concrete: the erection of progress, visible to all the East River.
Indeed, Hunters Point South as it is now is heartbreakingly beautiful, so much so that our consensus builds around inaction: “I know where I am at, but I don’t feel like I am at the spot where I find myself.” Yet as architects, we are unable to doubt our own facilities. Though legions past have tried and ultimately failed to solve this design problem, we in our naiveity, with our history, our empathy, and our self-awareness – we can try again and teach the world through our inevitable failure.
Such an opportunity to inhabit a city in completely different way is a power rarely furnished and less often exercised. The site at Hunters Point South is such an opportunity.
Having explained the structure, it is now time to propose one possible form of architecture capable of responding to the crisis of erasure. The proposal: instead of construction (nails, glue, welding), we propose assembly (nuts, bolts, framing). By embedding the processes of assembly into each building we automatically embed the possibility of disassembly into each building, so anticipating their erasure and transmuting imminent crisis into a cycle of death and rebirth.
Much like consumer products – appliances, electronics, clothing, cars – are understood to be complete and functional items with a planned obsolescence, so our buildings are meant to be complete and functional units with a planned disassembly. They are entirely a product of their time, and upon removal are meant to be recycled elsewhere in the building or offsite, as technological innovation dictates their usefulness.
Assembly, impermanence, and compaction of the building systems into the floor/ceiling cartridge grants domestic architecture freedom to submit itself to the market for designed objects. Since the layout and appearance of each wall panel is inconsequential to the core functionality of the unit, wall panels are able to be replaced, upgraded, and sent for repair as needed. In the absence of permanence, the exterior of each unit may become a means of expression; we anticipate a stratification of panels, from branded panels - the Mercedes-Benz-equivalent panel; the Apple-equivalent panel; the Wal-Mart-equivalent panel – to crafted artisan panels that, paradoxically, may in fact accelerate the adoption and evolution of new residential architectures.
The Museum is by nature a cataloging, Enlightenment institution. Art museums do more than just collect and exhibit artwork - they proclaim objects as "art" through the very acts that make them a functioning museum. They are machines of exhibition and acquisition, processes that transform the objects they touch into art while often divorcing these same objects from their inceptive purposes and/or meanings.
The studio began this brief by looking at MoMA and analyzing one particular exhibit in depth. My examination - a cataloging of the metadata of the exhibition, a cataloging of the cataloging apparatus itself - led to the discovery of narratives hidden within the metadata. These narratives give me a reading of the metadata of collection & exhibition as a sort of database of the institution's own art history; as a snapshot of the institution's authority over time. This diagrammatic, data-driven reading of the museum's exhibitions and the subsequent re-organization of the exhibit based on its own metadtata is what I term "Metacuration".
What is the nature of a collection, and what historical curatorial proclivities make up its aggregation? How can one create a series of spaces that delineate the same kind of stories as an infographic of the exhibit can delineate? In the approaching era of near infinite access to cultural information, how does architecture compete with the database?
To achieve Metacuration in three-dimensional space, one needs:
My goal was to design an architctural system that anticipates all possible metadata reconfigurations of its collection.
In order to achieve such a system, my musuem combines the storage of its permanent collection with the display of the same collection. These two functions - storage (preservation) and display (communication) take place within the entire space of the building, and are organized around axes of metadata that change every month. Indeed, it is these reorganizations that are the engines of Metacuration: each new reorganization brings with it a new set of spatial relationships between each piece; a new set of neighbors that changes how each piece is viewed. The flexibility of the storage & display apparatus within the museum allow for custom denisities; for closed storage; and for the architctural benefits of the grid: pieces can be displayed at a consistent desntiy across the axis, or may be grouped according to a regular access.
Finally, the only spaces not used for storage and display - the only programs not able to be sacrifices to the machine of Metacuration - are the lavatories, which are placed in the center of this machine and become the only human presence in the building. Indeed, as the machine is organized around display on the scale of the human body, the lavatory intrusions are inevitably the most conspicuous foil for this machine, their banality serving as the only refuge from the omnipresent and overpowering regualrity of the organization of the collection.
During the Summer of 2009, Evan Sharp, founder of HeaderFooter, spent some time interning with Timo Lindman Architect, PLLC in New York.
One of the projects he was involved with was the renovation of an existing Brownstone in Park Slope, Brooklyn. Evan was lucky enough to follow this project through several stages, from the initial client consultations, through the measurement of the existing premises, through schematic design and then into the drafting of the construction documents, some of which are pictured here in low quality, out of respect for the Timo and the client.
The description of this project forthcoming.
This design for a Climatology Labratory Headquarters in New York City is grounded in a fascination with the Dome; with experiments in environmental isolation epitomized by the Biosphere II experiment and NASA's experiments in closed-environment living.
The Dome is a scientific and ecological ideal that no longer represents environmental realities understood to be true by science, but that continues to embody the dominant perspective of desirable environmental conditions as understood by media, educational, and legislative dialogues.
With contemporary threats of global warming, unprecedented environmental devastation, loss of species diversity, overfishing, and other ecological crises, the Utopian isolation of the Dome has become more than inaccurate, it has become harmful: it must be officially "unsealed". In place of isolation, this laboratory will study & communicate to the public why the idea that nature must exist in an idealized, inceptive, pre-human state is threatening to the long-term health of Biosphere I.
The climatology laboratory brief is altered to the design of a labratory of urban ecology, interested in the interaction between the "natural environment" and the "urban environment".
Whereas the dome is an isolated, closed-environment, the urban ecology laboratory contains three distinct areas of climatological and vegatative study: the Terrarium, a standard enclosed space for the study of strictly controlled environmental conditions; the Solarium, a space outside of the building that is entirely open to the city, for the study of urban conditions; and the Vivarium, a space sheltered within the mass of the laboratory yet open to the city's climate and its public pedestrians, for the study of the interaction of these two conditions.
Formally, the box carries the banal, monolithic state of the surrounding buildings (the adjacent Holland Tunnel Ventilation Tower and City Sanitation Garage) into the site, which the terrarium and vivarium then punctures and interrupts through a formal lanuage of curvilnear strips - a technique used to achieve partial control, partial openness, and partial enclosure simultaneously.
The intersections and openings of the box and the strips are placed at the intersection of these two system, and where the terrarium / vivarium and the box interact becomes the point where the Dome unseals, where the Utopia of the dome is unraveled by the language of the strips.
This is the crucial moment of urban ecology, where uncertainty (the raw material of science) is generated so that science may perform its certainty-producing function.
The description of this laboratory is forthcoming.
