Intro

“Individuals survive only if their community survives, and the community survives by the concerted effort of all its members.”
Lebbeus Woods

This quote says a lot about the ways our societies where formed. A team is only as strong as its weakest member and this is something that people today seem to have forgotten. The NYCHA projects, built to protect and offer habitation to people with lower incomes, are a city on their own. A city striving on its own, left alone with minimum funding and with no alterations whatsoever since the 50’s. Our goal is to offer a constructive change in terms of better living environment and improved social integration, goals that are not only long termed but also vital for the existence of these households. The basic strategy consists of breaking down and “deteriorating” the existing massive blocks in order to create smaller and more agile communities. Those communities would be re introduced into the rest of the city with a series of outward facing programs that will have an end goal to transform the project’s grounds from a vacant spot to be avoided, into a condensing ground that will bring people from all over the city into it.

Final boards

      

changing through time

 
Here are the added “boxes” depicted as white since they will be built by a different material. They represent the volumetric differentiation through time and not the design in specific.






At these diagrammatic renderings it is shown how the process of displacing can create open space at the building. More “white boxes” can added next to the building as an extension of it, where the removed apartments can be. Even the boxes that represent public use are depicted as white, like a canvas. Each addition or public intervention can have its own architectural language or not. It’s free for people to decide when or how they are going to build it. Here is just a volumetric approach in order to show the potential of creating space.

sketches of the additions and a kitchen

  

diagram

Public interventions

Here is where private should start blend with public. There is a layer of semi – public and another layer for public. The first one is actually “public” for the people who live in the specific tower. This layer can host community centers or the gardens where these people work on. Since there is always the feeling of protecting your “own” area that is why these areas have to serve them and only them. On the other hand, as we go further from the building we can find the public interventions which can be the NYCHA programs. These programs, within a big variety, can be art classes, educational programs or agricultural activities. At these places anyone can go, having like that a revitalized site with people interacting instead of a mute area with parking lots and fences.

A community center can be the place where people should do their meetings for the local issues and their 8 hour minimum service at the center. In addition it can be a place where people can read, rest or talk.

Art classes are one of the most popular activities within the NYCHA programs. The problem though is that sometimes the site lacks enough space or infrastructure for these programs.

the plans

 
 

general treatments for the bldg

Displacing a specific amount of apartments here can show how the volume of the building can increase, incorporating more sunlight and ventilation to the apartments and the corridor. This process can also be done step by step through time showing like that the strengths or weaks of the existing program.
Since some apartments will moce to the top, more space can be provided to public services like community centers or NYCHA programs.

This is a floor plan of the tower showing the plug ins, the balconies and the common kitchen serving one floor or 9 apartments.

At this diagram, the green color shows the possible light shafts and the red the plug ins.

Floor plans

Here are the voids, the additions and the kitchens for each one floor. The number of the apartments is remaining the same. Some of them will change based on the necessities of the families. One family might need extra space because they are expecting a new child or because somebody needs extra equipment for his/her job. Since there is a diversity in terms of the family structure there, extra space might serve different necessities.
NYCHA can provide those components with specific rules of who can be eligible to get extra space. Beyond the fact that some people might need extra space quickly as stated above, people that help their community should gain the opportunity of having an extra room. In low income communities it is crucial to keep people together and work for their community in order to sustain or make better the quality of their lives. It is like an organism that is totally depended on its people and emerging through the relations among them rather than having one system ruling them.


This diagram shows 7 different types of apartments after a possible conversion. They have changed with the basic rule to have the living areas facing to the south. The proposed plans are based to old ones since there is still the implied grid of the rooms having in that way the new rooms working perfectly with the old structure.

Pruitt Igoe

vertical neighborhoods for poor people



Pruitt Igoe was a public housing project built on 1955 in Saint Louis in Missouri. It was designed by Minoru Yamasaki, the architect who actually designed the twin towers. The project was a “response” to slums where low income people were experiencing hygiene problems and additionally to the possibility that these slums could negatively impact the area around them. So the stacking of people were planned to be done in 33 high rise buildings.
It took less than 20 years for the demolition to start which means that the decay of them where already started..
Few years after construction, neglect, crime and vandalism started to rose at the project. Elevators or any other architectural element that might seem helpful after a while turned into dangerous zones. It is already known what Jacobs was describing at her book concerning the indoor “public” spaces like corridors or dark areas like stairs can become possible spots for mugging. It is also interesting to mention that the city was planning to position black and white people in different blocks!!
So it is true that this project represent the failure of a specific approach to housing problems as it became a victim of its own architectural discipline.

Zeitgeist

According to a previous post here (from 1950 to 2010) this project as the rest in NYC seems to be isolated not only in terms of location and accessibility but in terms of time as well. So here is depicted how a mute structure would start change through time for people’s needs. It has to be a process that will be based on how the community’s needs will change. As the rest of the city is developing, we can the significant changes through history that mean something for the present, revealing to us the nature of each specific period.

transformation stages:buildingvsnature

“We need a way to live, a lifestyle that allows us to thrive within our ecological means, a mode of existence not unlike what Mannahatta’s residents once knew in terms of sustainability and respect. As you will see, Mannahatta supported enormous numbers of living beings with diverse appetites and remarkable requirments; it did so powered entirely by the sun and through efficient recycling if its resources. The people  who lived on Mannahatta had a profound effect on the landscape, but not one that excluded other creatures or was beyond the power of the landscape to accommodate over time. Mannahatta succeeded because of the extraordinary diversity of life-forms and the concentration of interactions and dependencies among them, much like NYC succeeds because of the extraordinary diversity of talents and interests among its people, concentrated and energized by the urban landscape. Cities are ecosystems – ecosystems dedicated to people.”
excerpt from the book “Mannahatta, A Natural History of New York City”

renderings

The picture here represents an idea of how the water element can act as a background feature in combination with a new “intervention” at the site. A possible combination here can be a theater since there is a seniors place at the vicinity.
Below there is a rendering with the basic structure of the building combined with the attachable devices working either as public spaces or as extensions of the apartments.

room possibilities

 
These diagrams represent possible solutions for the new attached parts. With these prefabricated components, new rooms can be added to existing apartments.

add ons + voids and plan configurations

This is a basic diagram of the displacement idea and how this idea can work with all the floor plans at the building. Some voids can work as the common places in the tower like the kitchens or a kindergarten. The additions can work as individual balconies or gardens and sometimes can even form an apartment at the top of the tower.


   
1. the add ons  2. the voids and  3. the combination

Common kitchens as a social interaction device

 
Almost the 20% of the people living at Baruch Houses are coming from a foreign country. Most of them are families with children and there is a big percentage of unmarried mothers. That said, cooking for them is not only a part of their culture but sometimes is also a challenge.
So instead of having separate kitchens they can have common kitchens where they can cook for each other and interact more than usual. Kitchens can be sometimes the attractors within a family. Here it can be a place of exchanging cooking ideas or gathering for a specific issue concerning the community. Here children can meet with other children and being supervised by an adult. In few words it can host daily stories of the people living there.
One kitchen is approximately 6 square meters (64 square feet). If these areas combine in a larger one, then the left over space of each apartment can be the space of individual activity.

how to treat a bldg or 896 cubes

Here is depicted the main idea of scaling down the volume of these rigid buildings. Instead of one large volume we can think of this as a vessel of boxes (1 box can equal 1 room). What if we start displacing these cubes or moving them in and out? In that way more open space per floor can be achieved and balconies can added at people’s daily life. So the volume of the building will start growing since the mass of it will remain the same in order to have more space per person.

possible forms for site interventions