- spring 2003
advanced studio VI
critic: Joel Towers
resilience 1
1] Resilience, as a concept, emerges from physics, where it is defined as the maximum amount of energy per unit volume that a material, subjected to strain, can absorb prior to elastic failure. 2] First applied to dynamic non-equilibrium ecological study in 1973 by C.S. Holling, resilience, in this context, defines a system's maximum capacity to absorb change prior to system collapse or restructuring. 3] More recently, S.E. van der Leeuw (2000) has employed resilience as a measure of socio-natural systems and their capacity to be construed, beyond static and anthropocentric models of sustainability, as self-organizing, information processing, flow-structures.
construing urban ecology
Shifts in spatial and temporal understanding can alter the way we see the question of architecture allowing us to localize global issues and urbanize local ones.
The twentieth century was the century of urbanization from the standpoint of population shifts, capital accumulation, and infrastructural development. At the beginning of the last century there were sixteen cities with populations exceeding one million people. Today there are 500. Within a few years the majority of the world's population will be living in urbanized areas.2 It is imperative that we reframe the question of urban ecology. Marx theorized the problem as a metabolic rift - a rupture or estrangement between the urban and the rural (the worker and the land), manifest in the depletion of soil nutrients as a direct result of the exportation of food and fiber to expanding cities.3 Today the problem is twofold; negotiating the ecological footprint of an urban area in a globalized market and defining what we mean by environment; a slippery term that signifies different things to different people depending on the spatial and temporal condition from which it is viewed. Unpacking the relationship between architecture and urban ecology is where this studio will begin. To do this we must move beyond eco-technological fixes (energy efficiency, green materials, etc) and prosaic manifestations of sustainability. A reframing of the questions of architecture is required if we are to deploy our technical, theoretical and practical skills in an effort to resituate this urban ecology project beyond existing models of green and sustainable architecture. This is paradigmatic. The negotiation between the tangible, performative, immediate projects of architecture, their long term transformative potential, and the dynamic process of their production present a dialectical condition of urbanism. Given the contested social-ecological nature of this terrain, the translation from some present urban condition to an alternative future is, as David Harvey suggests, constrained by three essential questions of positionality: "[1] where we can see it from, [2] how far we can see, and [3] where we can learn it from."4 Add to these the following: If we shift the position from which we ask the question of architecture will we find new spatial and temporal scales at which to operate? What programs might emerge? How will we define site? boundary? value? How will we negotiate between projects previously conceived of as autonomous. Were they ever so? How will the system change?
re-imagining Newtown Creek
The studio will be sited along and within the Newtown Creek including the Maspeth Creek, Whale Creek, Dutch kills, English Kills, and their immediate environs. Currently the area is an active (post)industrial ecosystem comprised of production facilities, storage, waste management, petrochemical and material transfer stations. Situated less than three meters above sea level, the entire zone is a threshold in the reconfigured topography of global climate change. It is a site of remarkable infrastructural potential where diversified modes of production and new industrial technologies could emerge. It is the work of this studio to imagine what these will be -- to determine what theaters of operation aligned along this edge are possible. How will they work together, independently, in connection to the city, the region, and the globalized environment? Can the area support housing, alternative modes of transport, new urban worlds?
In the span of 200 years the Newtown Creek and surrounding landscape have gone from an ecosystem largely undisturbed by human intervention to an agrarian ecosystem and then to an industrial ecosystem - from wetland to farm land to waste land - from tidal estuary to transportation hub, to sewer to industrial canal. And yet the transformation of this site across time and at various scales, while clearly evidencing the unchecked logic of early industrialization, is but one chapter in it's history. As the author Eric Zencey suggests, "[t]he ecological crisis is also a historical crisis. If we are out of place in nature we are also out of place in time and the two kinds of exile are relate."5 Our work with the Newton Creek is about understanding this exile and charting paths beyond it. Despite the environmental condition of the site, or perhaps because of it, the site is latent with potential. Our goal will be the transformation of this blind spot in the heart of New York City.
program
Projects and programs will emerge from investigations of the questions above. We will begin with a spatio-temporal mapping of the site in both digital and physical form. The studio will then establish a set of ecologically reflexive understandings across the site that will serve as the basis for negotiation between individual projects. Work may be located anywhere within the Newtown Creek region or in direct relation to the complex system of urbanization in which it participates.
travel and research
During the week of March 9-16 the studio will make a research trip to Rotterdam and Amsterdam where we will focus on harbor/river front projects and the success/failure of the ecological agenda associated with recent development.
Augmenting the socio-ecological nature of our work, a cross-disciplinary group of scholars will participate in the studio. All will make individual presentations to the group and will participate in design reviews. The guests are geographer David Harvey, senior NASA/Goddard research scientist Cynthia Rosenzweig, and Ware Professor of Architecture, Kenneth Frampton
"[T]he integration of the urbanization question into the environmental-ecological question is a sine qua non for the twenty-first century. But we have as yet only scraped the surface of how to achieve that integration across the diversity of geographical scales at which different kinds of ecological questions acquire the prominence they do." 6
"Urban biodiversity exists at a crucial nexus of ecological and societal interactions, linking local, regional and global scales.... While more traditional notions hold that the environments of cities are static and that once intensive development has taken place, (e.g. urbanization), ecological functions and properties disappear, continual change in both the natural and the built environments characterizes even the most urbanized sites. Urban ecologies are projected to become even more dynamic in the future, particularly as a result of global climate change." 7
"The idea of "urban acupuncture" advanced as an operative metaphor by the Catalan urban designer Manuel de Sola Morales may also be assumed as a general analogue for what is operatively possible at a given moment or moments in time, either as a relatively limited, single intervention in terms of built fabric in the conventional sense or as a modification of say a transportation infrastructure or of an ecosystem that may in its turn entail modifying aspect of a watershed or rectifying current patterns of waste disposal or even the recovery of brownfield sites of varying size and configuration through...forms of landscape intervention." 8
notes:
1. three ways of seeing resilience: [1] the Oxford English Dictionary [2] Holling, C.S. Resilience and the Stability of Ecological Systems. Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics 4 / 1973. pg 1-23. and Gunderson, L.H., Pritchard, L. Editors. Resilience and the Behavior of Large-Scale Systems. Island Press 2002. pg 1-18. [3] van der Leeuw, S.E. and Aschan, C. A. Long-Term Perspective on Resilience. Paper presented at workshop on "System Shocks - System Resilience" Sweden May 22-26, 2000.
2. Harvey, D. Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference. Blackwell Publishers Ltd., Oxford, UK. 1996. pg. 403
3. Foster, J.B. Capitalism and Ecology: The Nature of the Contradiction. Monthly Review, Vol 54, No. 4, September 2002. pg. 6
4. Harvey, D. Spaces of Hope. Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 2000. pg. 254
5. Zencey, Eric Virgin Forest: Meditations on History, Ecology and Culture. Athens; University of Georgia Press, 1998. pp.12-28
6. Harvey, D. Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference. pg. 429
7. Rosenzweig, Cynthia and Solecki, William D. Biodiversity and the City: A Case Study of the New York Metropolitan Region. Submitted to Landscape and Urban Planning, July 2002.
8. Frampton, Kenneth. Toward a Dynamic Mediatory Approach in the Field of Environmental Design. September 2002.
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Joel Towers
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