FALL 2019
Kevin Mojica + Austen DeGrenier | Design Studio 07 | Prof. Alfonso Peres-Mendez
Manhattan, New York City, NY, USA
History & Culture
Chelsea 20 years ago, was merely a residential community with scattered galleries, boutiques, and local restaurants. Today, Chelsea is in a state of gentrification with immense amounts of economic activity populating the general area with the introduction of the High line and soon to follow Hudson Yards. The addition of the High Line created a burst of real estate development in the neighborhoods that lay along the track, and a skyrocketing of real estate values and overall cost of living. This has posed to be both beneficial and detrimental to the surrounding community. It has left many without affordable housing, and forced many to evacuate the area and find housing elsewhere. The increase of rent, as well as the loss of neighborhood customers due to inflated prices, caused well-established businesses with deep cultural roots to permanently close. Small family-owned businesses, such as grocery stores, laundromats, and goods, were quickly replaced by fashion boutiques and exotic restaurants that catered to the tastes of the wealthy new residents. This new wealth introduced a cultural transition towards the upper middle class.
The local wealth bought a new diverse market to Chelsea. The new class of wealth allowed approximately 350 galleries to populate along 10th and 11th ave. and many large companies to populate vacated commercial real estate. The recent addition of Hudson yards has bought gross amounts of money and pedestrian traffic with the new shopping additions and visitor traffic. The need for a central hub of information and technology could be beneficial to the local area. Bringing the community, from the engineering firms as well as local architecture firms to a centralized point in Chelsea to promote new and substantial growth to the fading community. These projects could provide a chance for new sustainable and affordable means to bring small businesses and families back to this once-thriving area.
Programming
Our idea of a microcosm, within a megacity like New York City, begins with the integration of an educational community that would foster the existent and missing culture. Our initial analysis of Chelsea depicted the need for a centralized hub for education and Technology. The North-Eastern side of Chelsea has an extensive amount of engineering firms, while the lower west side has a majority of Architecture firms. The surrounding design and construction displays a strong technological advancement within the built environment of the Chelsea neighborhood. The development of the Hudson Yards towers is a prime example of the aspirations from architects, planners, developers, and engineers. The new development boasts an advancement in energy-monitoring systems for improved building consumption efficiency. Stormwater management is more efficient and is used for local landscape irrigation, digital sensors will record pedestrian-traffic, temperatures, air-quality, noise-levels, and other components of the daily functions in a building for a more sustainable and consistent operation.
Tying these aspirations in large-scale urban communities, such as the Hudson Yards, our block project attempts to foster the innovating research in the sustainable field and create a community formed by an extension of a technical university that grounds the project in a heavy arts community. Chelsea’s new Hudson Institute of Technology becomes a cultural hub for attempts to integrate itself into a community of rapid technological advancement and harbor innovation in the form of a “creative milleu”, a local system which possesses the necessary requirements of both soft and hard infrastructure to generate creativity, innovation, ideas, and so on, allowing individuals to aspire better futures.
Based on our spatial configuration of the urban block, a composition dominated by shorter buildings (< 100’) allows our composition to harbor a mix of educational, recreational and commercial into cohesive compositional building. We arranged a mix of commercial and recreational programs on the ground floor to promote local attraction to the University. Exhibition and gallery spaces demonstrate the technological achievements from the labs located above the ground floor. The educational programmatic spaces were located above the ground floor to allow a continuous connection between labs, classrooms, private study and offices. It also tied into the housing element. There are approximately 200 dorms and 50 small family apartments for faculty and staff. Grafting the educational and residential elements allowed us to fulfill a single compositional block.
Utilizing a unified educational program required us to develop an element to our university that broke up our programmatic spaces. Since the most prominent side of our project faces the southern direction, the block required a façade that could help diffuse the harsh sun. We incorporated a perforated screen façade with a structural ribcage. The façade provides an inhabitable exterior condition as well as provide partial shade condition for the interior courtyard.
New York is known for its dark alleyways where the sun can't reach the ground. Low height buildings promoted for an interactive and lively interior courtyard due the the high southern sun allowing to reach the ground for the majority of the day. We wanted to incorporate a courtyard that could house external exhibition spaces but still confine them to the boundary of our University. The majority of the courtyard was to be open to the elements but there as a need to close off a section to the elements . We decided to provide a connection between the educational program and screen it off and allow protection from the elements and provide shade.
Spatial Configuration
The generators for our block project’s spatial configuration was first influenced by the surrounding sectional studies, 3 blocks in each cardinal direction (N,S,E,W). The heights and widths of the buildings in the imposed 3 block radius arrange a foundation for the potential elevation views of our project from each side. By using these sectional lines, the development of our project form remains in the contextual urban-fabric of the Chelsea neighborhood through its registration lines. The form-making process is then a literal translation of the larger context being compressed into a 200 ’x 800’ site, allowing a change in scale for both residents, students, workers, and visitors of our project to experience the larger components of Chelsea in a more intimate composition.
A sectional study of the East and West (longitudinal) direction of the site, between the streets of 10th Avenue & 9th Avenue and the intersecting West 28th Street and West 29th Street, displayed the prominence of the new Hudson Yards towers and their daunting heights in comparison to neighboring towers. The approaches to integrate the formal composition of this project’s elevation, in relation to the longitudinal context elevation, led to the use of 3 towers within the site. The tallest tower stands at 450’, the second tower stands at 400’, and the third tower is only 225’. Adding these towers created a mixture of buildings that resembled a common Manhattan block, consisting of mixed-use spaces from residential, commercial, recreational, educational, and public spaces. The use of towers also adds the hierarchy required to hold an edge of the block like an armature piece and contain the functions of the block, while acting as a landmark for new development. Furthermore, the towers are essential to the New York landscape because they are the most efficient method of constructing new spaces due to the highly-dense concentration of buildings and the population of people.
Implementing the three towers into the 200’ x 800’ site presents the problem of proportion, unifying the differences in heights is important to achieve desired spatial experiences to both urban and human scale. Studying the North-South (cross-sectional) direction of the sit, between the West 28th Street and West 29th Street and the intersecting streets of 10th Avenue & 9th Avenue, brought a smaller scale to compositions of blocks and the shorter aspects to the Chelsea neighborhood. Along with this study, there was a strong display of galleries, restaurants, schools, churches, and other public buildings. The absence of the Hudson Yards’ towers was replaced with a distant view of the South-Midtown skyline. However, this disconnection to high-rise buildings allows a concentration to smaller-scaled compositions for public spaces- especially with the adjacent Chelsea Park. The overall formal composition of our project, in this cross-sectional view, was confined to a short stretch of 200’; therefore, the elevation of our project had to capture the main gesture of the longitudinal view while creating a captivating public entry and dialogue at the street level (10th Ave.). In order to achieve this dialogue with the street level, the massing of the larger buildings are elevated 30’ above the ground level and provides a smaller scale at human height, in relation to the adjacent buildings in the area that don’t exceed 200’. This gesture is common throughout the streets of New York and acts as a consistent pattern through every building, despite its overall height.
A mixture of towers, floating masses, and a prominent “shell” façade create a series of undulations between the spatial composition of the block. A language of push and pull creates a system that begins to act as the datum through the system of masses. The resulting cavity amidst the differing masses is then the main ground circulation for but influences the movement occurring in higher spaces to maintain the centralized configuration of the spaces and emphasize the prominence of the potential central plaza.