The Grand Interior

Today, digital technologies are undeniably modifying the way we use and live in the city. Due to the actual cyber reality, the classic dichotomies between public-private, collective-individual, night-day spaces… that characterized a great part of the architectural discourse of the twentieth century, have lost their connotation. Today, Architecture cannot be understood detached from an interconnected reality, where buildings, more than isolated entities, are part of a larger system of common spaces and services that link the micro with the macro, having consequences on the social, the economical and the environmental at large.

The increasing mix among public and private spheres, allows us to think of the world as a continuous interior or following Sloterdijk’s image as a ‘grand interior’, an endless domestic landscape defined by spaces, objects and technologies, where the public space is being redefined, moving from the archetype of the street—as the paradigm of the common—to a more complex situation where public and private merge all along the city. In this scenario, the home is also becoming part of this public realm.

This new public condition might be an opening to rethink preset architectural limits and urban classifications that were used to assure benefit in detriment of social rights. Architecture has been traditionally used as a tool to define and perpetuate colonial processes. It is an effective agent of restraint able to assure the power of certain social sectors over others. It is not neutral and it might consequently be perceived as such. Not only has the division of public private has been a driving force for the development of biased social structures, but also other processes of urban planning and building.

In Core I, we understand the shift of public space as an invitation to redefine social structures for a better common welfare. We address the course looking to our actual and close reality, taking the everyday life of Broadway Avenue, Manhattan, as a starting point and base for an architectural proposal. We look at buildings and their urban context, understanding the quotidian as a platform for a deeper research that allows us to comprehend the complexity of the built realm, its actual functioning and requirements in relation to economic, climatic, environmental, social and political issues. And we design Architectures that answer to those realities: transgressing, empowering, complementing, … existing networked spaces. We produce architecture from the urban towards the detail, from the drawing towards the construction, and during that path we always foster graphical, formal and material experimentation as an intrinsic part of the design process.

Lower Manhattan is a dense layering of historic and contemporary spaces and events enmeshed in the creation and protection of value. Along Broadway from Battery Park to Houston, clusters of buildings are currently designated as civic, financial, or for manufacturing; some still representing a link to some of the area’s earliest land uses. Outside the wall, from which we now have Wall Street, used to be The Commons and the African Burial Grounds, two landscapes that were part of everyday life in New York for nearly 200 years. Both sites of extraction were physically external to the city, but functioned as the primary means by which the internal prosperity of the city, private property and material ownership, were enhanced. Over time, extraction sites have been removed further and further outside the city, but are critical to the function of the city. Students will be asked to examine accumulation along Broadway, considering the reciprocal sites of occlusion elsewhere, and exposing extraction’s continued adjacency to the erasure of the contribution to the built environment by Black, Indeginous, and People of Color. With this in mind, students will respond with arguments for the deconstruction and reconfiguration of this accumulated material to ultimately propose a new material commons.

It is incumbent upon any architect to know of the ground on which they stand, the ground upon which they will ultimately build.

The studio will employ a lens of historical criticality as we analyze Broadway and its surrounds from Houston Street to 30th Street. The region, today comprising three major historical districts, Noho, Flatiron and Madison Square North will be approached through a series of temporal overlays. Guided by pivotal events spanning from Broadway as a thoroughfare - originally known as the Wesquaegeek Trail - to the 300 acres of African owned farms known as Land of the Blacks under Dutch colonial rule which centered around present-day Washington Square Park, and including the impact of the East Village/Noho artist movement of the 1980s in which artists shifted the public consciousness.

Students will construct spatial hypotheses grappling with scale, ownership, property, land, appropriation, center narrative, the concept of ‘for the public good’ and be sufficiently conversant in forces that govern public use in order that final spatial proposals produce expressions that are both imaginative and critically poignant.

Through the use of the orthographic cut, students will dissect history as a stack, responding to the figuration and reconfiguration of society as a continuum. Through the study of precedent sites students will cultivate an understanding of the flow of placement and displacement, of land and belonging, transpiring over time in the horizontal plane. Finally through the articulation of the section, the theme of the studio, Cutting Through, students’ design proposals will seek to reveal and activate historical and contemporary truths hiding in plain sight. Amongst a suite of techniques outlined in the Core 1 syllabus, student proposals will present concepts utilizing the architectural convention of the cut, namely, techniques of orthographic cuts, in horizontal and vertical planes, to reveal the significance of their conceptual provocations on public space.

At a time when the world is in a state of flux and uncertainty, there is a need to reflect upon its varied origins and rediscover life on earth and the greatness of its shared past that defers to truth and equality for all. As during the birth of this diverse nation, it is necessary to recall the freedoms that make New York the epicenter of new thought, culture, opportunity, and change in an illusive city that has died and has been reborn once more.

Broadway cuts diagonally across virtually every major organ of the city passing through the heart of Time Square and continues further beyond the cultural soul of Lincoln Center. Students will study the residual public pockets along this artery and how they are stitched together to become the fabric of the city and platforms for voice. These exchange places are public interventions within the network that become mechanisms for paradigm shifts and where many different levels of interaction occur to provoke change. The government, economy, media, and streets support numerous activities and movements that are the result of both evolution and revolutionary processes. Today it is essential to understand their complexity, and where social technolgies such as twitter, facebook, and other forms of media can be of avail. Moving between precincts that comprise the institution where people will discover communal places to gather and secret places to be alone in research and contemplation. These local forums are a palmpsest meant to be explored and discovered over time through its history. In doing so these local interventions will be for all who search to belong, a place where alternative positions intersect, friendships are formed, and where the unimagined can happen.

In 1959, President Dwight D. Eisenhower turned earth to start the construction of a new cultural center in New York City, the Lincoln Center. The project was part of Robert Moses’s program of urban renewal, and displaced more than 7,000 families and 800 businesses. Before then, the area used to be called San Juan Hill an it was a vibrant and culturally important neighborhood, populated mostly by African-Americans moving from both the southern United States and other areas of New York City, and by Puerto Ricans. With the project of urban renewal, 56% of the community was displaced. Those that stayed were mostly moved into a new public housing development, the Amsterdam Houses. As other NYCHA projects, the dwellings were formalized as a set of residential towers in a superblock with almost no urban services. The isolation of the complex reflects the challanges of public housing today that struggle with preset sharp physical and economical boundaries. In the studio, taking Amsterdam Houses as a paradigm, students will be asked to research and respond to existent urban boundaries that boost social and racial inequalities along the Upper West Side.

Columbia University’s presence dominates the northern portion of this stretch of Broadway and several blocks to the east and west. The university’s strained history with Black and Latinx communities of Harlem and Morningside Heights is rooted in a competition for space. This ongoing tension centers around the ability of local residents to maintain control over their living and recreational space in the face of the significant power the university wields as landlord and through its episodic campus expansion plans.

Opposition to the Vietnam War and the recent killing of Martin Luther King Jr. had already raised tensions on campus when in 1968, student outrage was triggered by the start of construction of a new $11 million 2.2-acre gym for Columbia students in Morningside Park, the 13-block long public park that had become a boundary line between the campus and neighboring communities to the east. The building’s two entrances: one for students above and a second small entry for local residents below, set up the segregated intent of the gym and reinforced the broader separation between the university and surrounding communities. This history will be context for our exploration of Morningside Park as a site of invention of new and inclusive formulations for public space.

For an Architecture of the New Commons

The studio aims to re-envision the urban voids of Harlem between 120th-152th street as an opportunity to create new ways of living collectively. Since urban voids — in the form of vacant land and buildings — directly relate to the gentrification of neighborhoods and the continuous spatial re-arrangement of African American communities in the area, making the new commons will generate tools to reject the violence of real estate capitalistic forces.

The new commons aim to address how architecture can create alternative paradigms to the individualistic, patriarchal, and white supremacist values that have shaped wealth disparity and accessibility to resources. These spaces will be designed and developed for the community through a universally inclusive strategy, assuring accessibility to food, education, housing, and meaningful work for all. Students will investigate the history of these interruptions to determine what and who generated these voids, to whom these plots of land belonged before becoming unused. They will be asked to articulate visions to reconfigure the urban fabric of Harlem, enabling more equitable and inclusive visions that transcend the nuclear family and facilitates alternative living, working, and educating arrangements. Specifically, we will target discriminatory urbanization patterns that will be re-oriented to a collective model of ownership and responsibility for “the commons,” defined as the space that ensures access to food, education, shelter, civic engagement, and meaningful work for all. This approach to the evolution of the cities can be at the base of the nation’s urban policies and planning revolution, where the collective is at the center of society’s well-being and prosperity.

With its dramatically elevated terrain, monumental infrastructural entanglements and largely diasporic and uniquely mobile Carribean and Latinx population, the spaces and territorialities of our segment of Upper Manhattan challenge the ways we might conventionally situate architecture against geological, infrastructural, regional and transnational scales. The linear megastructure of the Trans-Manhattan expressway straddles New Jersey and the Bronx while cleaving the thickest and one of the narrowest geological transects through the island. The totality of bridges, roadways, on-ramps, tunnels and high-rises here transcends the scale of the urban fabric through which it coils, burrows and towers over.

Immigration from the Dominican Republic to Washington Heights coincided with an era of affordable air travel producing a rapidity of movement and exchange between Manhattan and the Caribbean nation; between the imperial metropole and its periphery. The transnational territories and networks of the population transcends the city proper with many residents shifting seasonally or generationally between the Global North and Global South. The vibrancy of the neighborhood — under threat from gentrification in recent years — owes much to this exchange and the dual identity of its inhabitants.

The vertical shift in terrain at the Heights occurs where the island begins to feel like a part of the Hudson Valley, causing the relentlessness of the Manhattan grid to skew, fracture and loosen. Through intensive sectional analyses of the built environment and topography, the studio will seek to leverage the neighborhood’s verticalty, monumentality and inherently cosmopolitan and transnational character to produce new forms of public spatial intervention. In this way, we hope to question and further dislodge the colonial project of the grid and imagine new alternatives to the myriad spatial articulations of hegemony, visible and invisible, that permeate the city along the axes of both race and class. As we think about the expanded global territory of our segment of the island, we will also be conscious of the ways these forces of subjugation extend beyond the city in the form of the imperial project of the United States globally

“Problems need more problems in order to catalyze or leaven the organization. The desire of having a right answer is, in this frame, a mistake.”-Keller Easterling

The highly choreographed infrastructural systems of lower Manhattan become frayed in our zone. Northern Manhattan has historically functioned at the city’s fringe. Visible power stations, surface parking, elevated subways, original homesteads and natural landscapes all characterize our section of the city. From the city’s inception, the resources of northern Manhattan have largely been dedicated to the function and supremacy of lower Manhattan. Northern Manhattan’s subordinate role to its prodigal southern neighbor isn’t something that evolved by chance; it was designed and has been reinforced through zoning and public policy for centuries. Despite this structural inequity, the neighborhoods of Inwood and Washington Heights coalesced and thrived within the informality and resource scarcity. Known as the “Little Dominican Republic” the neighborhoods are home to a significant Latinx population. A recent ‘up-zoning’ of the area now puts the existing communities at risk of becoming the next frontier of gentrification and cultural erasure. Our challenge is to scenario plan a more just and public approach to our site’s growth, cultivating its assets to the benefit of the existing and future populations in a new Grand Interior.