New Natures: Visualizing CarboNYC
In PlaNYC 2030, New York City has set out an ambitious agenda to reduce global warming emissions by more than 30%. What will this new post-Carbon urbanism / city-of-tomorrow look like? The studio will visualize and project scenarios for a self-sustaining NYC with ambition, radical thinking, and a sense of urgency.
The studio will engage three sites, each operating across the scales of architecture, urban design and landscape. Our work will be driven by an initial period of short, structured and intensive seminar research. This initial research will be speculative and spark a project approach and design, combining theoretical speculation and hard work in envisaging a new synthetic cosmopolitan nature that blurs the natural and artificial.
More broadly, we will explore the role of landscape as an element of urban order in the context of rethinking New York’s future settlement pattern. We will investigate techniques and operations of an ecologically grounded landscape urbanism, from the perspective of a “critical discipline that would be capable of transcending the politico-technical impasse now confronting the architecture and urban design professions.” (Frampton) We will engage in rapid prototyping of new hybrid-scapes and begin to visualize and develop a vision that integrates architecture into an emergent mega-urban-landscape condition. Ideas will be developed through diagrams, drawings, and physical models, with emphasis on digital tools and techniques, including use of the CNC mill and laser-cutters. The semester is structured through a succession of collaborative and interactive projects, in an attempt to compress the research phase and to enable the imagination and development of new programs, occupations, publics, and ecologies. The results of the studio will be collected into a publication.
1. LOCAVORE
Issue: land use, food production & consumption
Site: Zerega Avenue, Bronx
Client: Just Food / Castle Hill Houses
Program: Part farm, part research laboratory, part food bank, part dining hall/meeting space
Description: 70,000 sf lot / underused community garden adjacent to Castle Hill Houses and the Bronx River
2. URBAN WILDERNESS
Issue: open space, biodiversity, education, humans, animals, interface, community
Site: Ridgewood Reservoir, Queens
Client: NYC Parks Department, iMAP (Interdisciplinary Mobile Architecture and Performance)
Program: 10,000 sf Environmental education center, performance space, classroom, bathroom, office This 50-acre urban forest helps sustain more than 120 bird species, including seven classified as endangered. An eco-industrial relic in the middle of New York.
3. ENERGY / PARK
Issue: energy, contamination, post-industrial land reclamation
Client: HQ and testing grounds for Ausra, Infinia, Altarock, and Great Point Energy
Site: Undeveloped former NASCAR site, Staten Island
Program: renewable energy HQ (for Khosla Ventures) and public park / public access
Description: This Former oil tank farm is one of the largest undeveloped sites in NYC
