New York City is in the midst of an economic boom, which has caused collateral damage to the available stock of affordable housing. We need to counter this by building and preserving more affordable apartments. This proposal uses mass timber construction to build new affordable housing on vacant "small lots" of substandard width and depth. These lots are city-owned and many are vestiges of a time when New York was in economic decline. These lots offer the perfect opportunity to help keep more New Yorkers in their current neighborhoods, preventing displacement, and to enable new people who are not fabulously wealthy to be able to afford to live in New York. They also present the perfect opportunity to build the first mass timber affordable housing in NYC.
The subject site at 113 West 136th Street is in the heart of Harlem, surrounded by beautiful solutions to the constraints of building on a 17'x100' lot. This proposal draws inspiration from the context and from classic New York apartment typologies to create a walkup building with a focus on quality of life, tempered by an efficient approach to construction. Key features include:
-6 unit walkup building, with an option for 8 units on the same footprint.
-Cross Laminated Timber floor and roof panels span from property line to property line, with exposed wood ceilings throughout all units.
-A shared stoop provides a place for the community to gather, and is a buffer to the street.
-An open-air, daylit stairwell allows for passive ventilation and operable vents for a cross-breeze in every apartment.
-The central stair eliminates interior corridor area except for the laundry and mail room, reducing construction costs and heating/cooling load of the building.
-Every unit has private outdoor space.
-The small unit sizes provide an excellent opportunity for affordable homeownership/co-ops or rentals.
-Flexible design strategy works well for an interior lot with 6 or 8 studio apartments as shown on West 136th St, or is easily adapted for other types of lots. On a corner or detached lot, 1- and 2-bedroom units are possible.
In a city where Real Estate has been at a premium practically since its founding, the significant opportunity to build on existing, underutilized space in New York is not only architecturally enticing, but economically logical. For my B. Arch Thesis Project at Rensselaer, I chose to address this idea.
The one year project began with extensive research of New York’s zoning laws and vacant rooftops, leading to a proposal to develop the rooftops of 12 blocks in DUMBO, Brooklyn as a new, viable neighborhood of the city. Studying the mechanics of zoning, development, and the diverse set of components which make successful neighborhoods, the ultimate goal was to create a development in the city which would not feel like the private domain of any one constituency, but simply another unique section of New York.
This parallel urban landscape was connected with vertical circulation through existing structures down to the ground plane and laterally between rooftops, adding a new layer of complexity and density to the city. Simultaneously exposed and hidden, the variety of spaces available suggested the development of commercial, residential, and cultural program, focused around a campus for the City University of New York for the study of Urban Farming.
The site plan of the project best showcases the variety of programs that could fit into this new neighborhood-within-a-neighborhood, and also highlights the amount of space that is currently unused on many of these formerly industrial buildings. As a planning approach, this project suggests a rethinking of the way we consider zoning codes, and also has the potential to be applied in other parts of New York, and even other cities.
This project examines the role of Political Speech platforms in the community, and considers how these platforms can be deployed as a system that is useful to the community after the campaign is over. By looking at the way people inhabit the city, and more importantly, leave certain void spaces within it, I developed a system of prerogatives for “localizing” the political campaign, in the way political speeches often promise but rarely manage to achieve. After all, what better way to reach a broad subset of constituencies, than to meet them at the neighborhood scale?
In tandem with this programmatic approach, I developed a construction system that comprised of a “kit of parts”- walls, floors, and canopies- that were deployable into the given width of a void space. This design process happened simultaneously through parametric modeling using Rhinoceros with Grasshopper, as well as extensive physical study models. Eventually, I reached a system that was flexible enough to work at the scale of a narrow empty lot, or an entire vacant pier.
Depending on the scale of deployment, different sites would have different after-uses. An empty lot being rented by the campaign could become a voting center and neighborhood resources office. At the scale of a pier, the speech platform is large enough to become a ferry station. In this way the platform becomes a viable neighborhood resource after the campaign has run its course.
