This Historic Preservation design studio invited students to rethink the idea of architectural adaptive re-use. The goal was to test some of the key assumptions on which adaptive re-use rests, such that it is possible to change the use of a building without fundamentally altering its historic significance. The project involved transforming the IRT 59th Street Powerhouse, designed by McKim, Mead and White in 1904, into an archive and museum of global pollution. This unusual program was meant to focus attention on the fact that the historic significance of the powerhouse certainly involved its Beaux-Arts aesthetic refinement, but it also entailed, among other things, the building’s role as a major producer of airborne pollution, some of which remains on its surfaces. The challenge presented to students was how to intervene in the IRT powerhouse in a way that would expand the visitor’s awareness of its historic significance from narrow matters of style to larger questions about pollution and its role in our understanding of architecture. At stake in each student project was whether pollution could be understood as intrinsic or extrinsic to the architecture of the IRT powerhouse. This question has been central to preservation theory since the famous scrape vs. anti-scrape debates of the 19th century. Each student project investigated the ambiguous architectural status of pollution, expressing its positive potential as a reflection of the building’s history or, alternatively, exploring its negative connotations as something that detracts from the building’s aesthetic integrity.

The semester was divided in two exercises. During the first half, students researched the history of a particular type of pollution, ranging from acid rain, car and subway emissions, heavy metals, as well as light and noise pollution. Armed with this historical and scientific understanding, each of them designed a harvesting device capable of scientifically collecting their particular form of pollution, and eventually archiving, and displaying it in the new re-used IRT powerhouse. These harvesting devices were really formulations of concepts regarding the nature of pollution, and how it affects our understanding of our architecture, the built environment and their history. Significantly, each harvesting device aspired to be more than just blind applications of technology. They all attempted to incorporate an aesthetic dimension, which to a greater or lesser degree served as evidence of the designer’s self-consciousness about the larger cultural implications of their technological harvesting operation. For instance, Michael Marsh’s apparatus for collecting traffic emissions doubled up as a large translucent skin that, slowly but surely, obscured the view of the building behind it, in a manner not unlike how smog obscures our perception of skylines. At times this self-consciousness also turned into didacticism, such as in the project of Ioannis Avramides which not only collected acid rain but also color-coded its varying degrees of PH. Avramides re-used the original coal hoppers as a large impluvium. Each of the projects engaged the relationship between technology and culture in historical terms. Paradoxically, this historical emphasis was most evident in projects that dealt with pollution that does not leave historical traces, such as light (Laura Michela) and sound (Lauren Younce, and Dong Min Park). Instead of harvesting, Michela, Younce and Park opted for reconstructing the experience of pollution. Younce’s reconstruction of the deafening sound of the engine hall was particularly promising.

In the second half of the semester students translated their harvesting concepts into strategies for re-using the entire building. For example, Lisa Michela carried her analysis of the accumulation of subway steel dust into a strategy for adding museum exhibits over time. Each of them recognized and exploited the parallelism between the dual nature of their harvesting devices as both science and art, and the dual character of the IRT powerhouse as a feat of both engineering and architecture. The structure is divided between a functionalist post-and-beam steel interior (designed by IRT engineers) and a classicizing façade of masonry Roman arches designed by McKim Mead and White. Some projects expressed this tension between interior and exterior literally, as in Park’s proposal to raise the interior steel structure above the masonry skin. This impossible doubling was carried out under the premise of satisfying the requirement to double the square footage of the existing building in order to accommodate the new museum and archive. By contrast, Younce attempted to weave exterior and interior together by introducing a new third element, a folding metal plane that enveloped both. At every turn, students considered how their decisions to retain certain parts of the building and eliminate others would affect its historic significance. Yuan Ren took this consideration to an urban scale, eliminating the waterfront façade of the IRT powerhouse in order to re-establish a historic connection that in her view had been lost during the intervening years since construction. Marsh pursued a similar urban objective, but he followed a logic of addition instead of subtraction, and proposed that the hotel function be built over the foundations of the historic loading pier where coal was once unloaded.

A major focus of the studio was to explore how pollution shapes our understanding of what is historic about architecture. Conversely, students considered how architecture may serve as a framework for understanding what is historic about pollution. The relatively recent notion of world architectural heritage served as a framework for understanding the historic significance of pollution, which is literally on every monument. The project brief to create a world pollution archive and museum raised the possibility that pollution itself, as an unintentional yet pervasive product of modernization, might be a negative paradigmatic example of world heritage.

Download Full Report (PDF)