A4005 Advanced Studio V
INSTRUCTORS: Reiser + UmemotoThe recent demands for an overhaul of our aging, overburdened, and dysfunctional transportation infrastructure by the State and Federal government follows on nearly eight years of rapid, voracious, and totalizing programs of improvement. Age, neglect, and, perhaps, most importantly, the inveterate notions of hierarchy that came along with this first wave of modernization have for the most part engendered distinctly negative conditions especially apparent at urban edges where systems at the extreme of scale, spaciality, program, and use are brought into close proximity.
The variety of factors axiomatic to early systems engineering and to the modernism as well tend to enforce highly stratified and segregated conceptions of hierarchy and the systems they underwrite. Indeed, the two are mutually reinforcing in this regard and hence complicit in the urbanism they produce.
In keeping with the call for proposals on sites in and around Columbia, the studio will focus on the westernmost segment of 125th Street from Broadway to the river and bounded on the north by the Municipal Sewage Treatment Plant and to the south by approximately 122nd Street where the land suddenly drops off to the 125th Street basin.
A trend already in evidence here relates to the affiliation of new programming to larger segments of infrastructure crossing the site. This process is exemplified at the small scale by the location of the Fairway supermarket between the 125th Street on/off ramps; the second by the post-programmed park atop the municipal sewage treatment plant. Each case represents two distinct forms of opportunism: the first a tactical decision by a commercial enterprise to locate a suburban type of market on the cheap and easily accessible real estate under the highway (thus being able to market simultaneously to the local residents while attracting the transient commuter with animated signs advertising bargains, entailing only a quick dip and the promise of an easy getaway). The second, the neighborhood park; an amenity conceded the residents in return for the hardship of the sewage facility.
Both programs also represent two distinct kinds of involvement in the systems they affiliate with. The first, Fairway, might be considered an intrinsic involvement because its survival depends on the precise functioning of the highway itself; the second, the park, an extrinsic involvement; in that the park came about as a distinct byproduct of the form and location of the sewage plant not as an unherent part of its process.
Both cases, however, while indicating viable principles for larger scale planning are not presenlty taken up in a comprehensive way therefore remain essentially local interventions.
This studio will seek a new type of urbanism in the form of what we will call a hybrid interchange. The purpose of this formation is twofold. First to enable the precise mixing of what are presently distinct stratified urban domains: fabric, green space, elevated highway, primary streets, secondary streets, etc. Second, beyond simply combining the known; to foster the development of new and perhaps unanticipated programs and organizations as an inherent property of the hybrid.
The studio will begin with the systems bequeathed us by modernity (locally at the site and globally in systems that cross the site) but will actively seek to lateralize these structures with the aim of loosening their grip and thereby encouraging the development of new urban morphologies that will reconfigure existing institutions and social space while promoting the advent of new ones.