Final show is held in 66 Fifth Avenue, 2nd Floor
View from 5th Ave.
Teams Work in Progress Week 10-11: The Unit
Taking a closer look at the unit, teams developed internal organization and external aggregation strategies.
Mid-review
The studio had its mid-review two weeks ago (a week before spring break).
Marc & Ariel presenting
Each of the teams integrated concepts about adaptation, dwelling, public program, and daylight into their projects.
Teams Work in Progress Week 5-6
North View
NYCHA Fulton Houses Tour
The studio made a visit to the Fulton Houses, graciously hosted by Kirstine Wolf of NYCHA and Marina Oteiza of Hudson Guild. NYCHA walked the site with us, both interior and exterior, and articulated in detailed fashion many of the requirements that public housing demands. We were able to see inside apartments, walk the egress stairs, explore the roof and cores (using the compact, aged elevators as well as walk the fire stair), and gather in both interior and exterior communal spaces. The trip culminated in a visit to Hudson Guild and a discussion with Marina regarding the needs of the community center.
View to the northeast from the central tower of the Fulton Houses in Chelsea
Entry Hall
South View
Inner Court/Playground
Pile Up
Ths is what happens when you take all the buildings at the NYCHA Fulton Houses in Chelsea and just pile them together. Paging Winy...
Takky Taniguchi and Leonie Van Buren
The Adapted Building - Pairs
Following the three weeks of independent work assessing site and building bulk, paired teams were formed. As there are eleven buildings on the Fulton Houses site, each pairing has been assigned a single building, with the accumulated adaptations forming a kind of Exquisite Corpse, at least at the outset. Bulk regulations were prescribed as guidelines for either addition, removal, or some combination thereof, of the mass of the buildings, while also demanding a specific density of dwellings within each structure.
Tower block alteration may involve removal of bulk or a slight addition of bulk, while the lower blocks may only be re-formulated or added to, with no removal of bulk allowed. In all cases a mix of unit types as prescribed by the brief must be accomplished, and at defined densities.
Communication between teams/sites has been encouraged, and shared spaces at ground and above must be negotiated by the pairings. Over time, the site will gain consideration and finer calibration from building-to-building, block-to-block.
Jack Dinning and Brandon Pietras
Marc Delaney and Ariel Gonzalez
Pei-Ying Lin and Ashley Mathews
Philadelphia - Northern Liberties
Philadelphia
The studio visited Philadelphia today, to see a number of projects by local firms Interface Studio Architects, Onion Flats, and Erdy McHenry. Most projects were located in the Northern Liberties area of the city, and notable projects included ISA's 100K House, Onion Flats' "Thin Flats" development, and Erdy McHenry's "Piazza". A quick stop at ISA's office gave the studio a chance to hear from principal Brian Phillips, see an exhibit of his work, and hear about ISA's honest and innovative working methods. Brian then took us on a tour of his dormitory at Temple University, "The Modules".
A few select pictures of the day follow.
100K House - ISA
EM Architecture - Piazza
A Cold Walk
Marc Delaney
Bulked Building
Based on the initial massing exercise the next step was to develop the massing language explored within the initial exercise, but for a single assigned building and associated ground area - at a larger scale. At this larger scale the challenge was to define, more specifically and in more detail, the nature and quality of key building elements. With greater care and calibration (though in admittedly intuitive and abstract fashion), students began to represent tectonic building elements such as core, structure, slab, and skin. Additionally, volumetric conditions and material characteristics such as the conditions of solidity, void, transparency, opacity, and texture were incorporated.
Emmanuel Oni
Adrian Carval Acosta (Foreground) and Merel Brabers (Background)
Pei-Ying Lin
Olga Berning
Bulked Site
The NYCHA site is underbuilt, in terms of NYC zoning floor area ratio rules, by approximately half. Based on the zoning designated for this site one can build up to 6 times the lot area in built structure. One of NYCHA’s most valuable assets is an aspect of “unbuilt-ness”. In this first exercise students are asked to instinctively deploy additional as-of-right available square footage to create a framework in which the NYCHA houses may be transformed to do several things, all at once. Goals are to accommodate more residents who need housing, to instigate a discussion around NYCHA’s land assets, and above all, to create a more dignified and innovative housing assemblage through variation, efficiency, and thoughtfulness in massing, unit aggregation, materiality, and urban landscape. The students were asked to consider the entire site and all eleven buildings, their total mass and square footage, and how to redeploy, exchange, add, or subtract bulk to alter and improve the urban morphology and architectural experience of dwelling in the city. There were no rules other than that the new bulk deployment was to remain under the 6.02 FAR of buildable square footage per current NYC zoning code. Presentation was in the form of simple mass models.
Emmanuel Oni
Dani Al-Edani
Site Visit
The studio walked the NYCHA Fulton Houses and surrounding Chelsea environs today. Clear skies, frigid cold, yet many of the apartments in the development were wide open, indicating that the interior ventilation is not calibrated at all, with the buildings significantly over-heated.
The Fulton Houses have nine low-block buildings and three towers spread across four city-owned lots. This view is due west from Ninth Avenue bewteen 17th and 18th Streets.
Professor David Leven on the site visit.
The NYCHA Fulton Houses in West Chelsea and are now embedded within a neighborhood that has experienced rapid gentrification. Due to the new presence of the High Line (from which this picture was taken), a huge influx of art galleries and cultural facilities, and the rezoning adopted for the High Line transfer mechanism (and futher downtown within the Meatpacking District), these houses are now anchored within an area in which property values are soaring. Class stratification has been highly physicalized and remains out in the open.
Context
The Site
Robert Fulton Houses, Chelsea NY
11 Buildings, 945 Apartments, 2,077 Residents
The Studio
This site documents the work of the first year Master of Architecture studio at the School of Constructed Environments at Parsons the New School for Design.
The housing studio is the second in the series of six required design studios in the graduate curriculum at Parsons. In this studio students study various conditions particular to housing, including the part (the unit) the whole (the housing building), public, semi public/semi-private, and private spaces, urban and ecological issues, and precedents of housing schemes.
Issues such as culture, technology, history, theory and applicable zoning regulations receive critical readings in this studio. This is done with an understanding that diagrams, drawings, and models – architectural conventions – are a form of thought and the language with which invention, rigor, and discovery are expressed.
Students in the Spring 14 section are studying the Robert Fulton Houses, a series of 11 buildings in Chelsea, Manhattan, owned by the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA). The students are tasked with analyzing, assessing, and adpating these buildings to address inefficiencies in planning, systems, and networking.