28-10-2011

Presentation by Studio Brooklyn at GSAPP Columbia University

- intro -


- city ecology -


- transformation moments -


- official respons on part 1 -


- collective culture -


- living models -


- official respons on part 2 -


- final discussion -

15-10-2011

EXPERIMENT



As an experiment, I looked at the subway as a destination instead of an instrument to get from point A to point B. I have therefore taken the subway 24 hours and lived one day without daylight. On the map below I wrote down my findings and feelings.

 

00.00 Start
00.40 A man has made a drawing of me to make money, but I think that
      I do not look like it(see below).
01.02 I feel okay.
01.22 I feel sorry for the woman and child who sleep in the subway.
03.10 Alternating hot and cold makes it hard.
03.30 It is strange to realize that at day, mass transit is for 
      everyone, and at night it becomes a sleeping place for 
      thousands of homeless people.
06.00 Commuters come on stream.
06.30 I'm falling asleep.
06.54 I feel tired and shaken.
09.45 I feel lonely in the crowd.
10.00 The words "see something say something" do not make me feel
      safe.
10.20 Transporting people is only part of the job of the subway.
      Much more takes place there : shelter for the homeless, 
      (illegal)trade, art, care of drunken people.
10.40 Subwayman loves it to say "stay clear of the closing doors 
      please".
10.45 A drunkard talks to everyone and finds everyone beautiful
12.00 I have seen 3 people arrested and removed by the police. I
      think they are more alert than usual.
13.20 It feels like I see a lot of people for the second time. 
      They all start to look alike.
14.00 Just watched boxing on TV in the subway at Time Square.  
      All tourists are awake
14.30 I talked with a crazy old Italian woman
16.50 Solitude and the airco is too hard.
18.30 Peak hour is insane.
19.00 Many tourists leave the subway.
19.10 Now it is enough.
20.15 Man has a tattoo of an external hard drive.
22.31 People smell like alcohol.
13.30 A man gets a stroke and is carried away by the police and 
      people.
24.00 Stop

In the Time Square station, in the corridor between the blue line and other lines is a poem hidden in the ceiling:


overslept 
so tired 
if late, 
get fired 
why bother? 
why the pain? 
just go home 
do it again


14-10-2011

Presentation of the theme 'Living Models'




Our sub theme is Living models. First of all, I shall explain what Living Models mean for us. Having a home is a social right. And for us Living Models is about the position of the housed individual in the global tendencies inherent to New York. It’s about the individual subjected to these large scale trends. We started our research by investigating and mapping these tendencies.

In the last decade Brooklyn’s population has grown with 39.000 people, which means right now Brooklyn has to provide housing for just over 2.5 million people.
To fulfill this demand 69.000 extra housing units have been built over the last ten years. This is more than new units in Manhattan and Queens together. Apart from a few exceptions, we can see a pretty homogeneous growth in housing units in the area of Brooklyn.

A third widely known trend is the persistent growth of rental prices. Throughout the history the city developed a wide range of tools to control rents. However it seems that some tools miss effect, as the PH rent for example almost doubled in 6 years. Today, in times of economic crisis affordable housing is more important than ever.

The last trend we noticed was the ever decreasing footprint of housing projects. This offcourse has many reasons but one of them is that Brooklyn is running out of space.

Basically we can recapitulate the problem as follows: On one hand there’s a great need for more affordable housing, on the other hand there’s less and less buildable space. Combined with a real estate driven housing market, we quickly saw the complexity in the present housing problem.

Next up, we researched some typical Brooklyn typologies. As you can see, there’s a clear relationship between typology and morphology. The tenement for example, designed to maximize the unit density, is much deeper than the brownstone. The word typology implies a multiplication of the same configuration.

As a result the morphology has an influence on the block. This is clear when we study the negative space of a building block. Each typology implies different qualities and different uses of that unbuild space.

So taking the present tendencies in account, we can ask ourselves the question which typologies are the most suitable today.

Another theme that we have studied is Brooklyn’s public housing. By gathering different distinguishing characteristics we tried to systematize the public housing projects. For example the distance to the nearest subway station, the median income and the unemployment rate. But very soon the data became very impersonal, so we came up with the idea to create the Brooklyn Public Housing Cardgame.Its the same cardgame you typically find with cars, boats and so on. We replaced the amount of horse power with median household income. So for example project A with a higher median income will beat project B. We also added some cards with non public housing projects, color coded by typology. It gives a really strange feeling to literally play with these emotionally charged buildings.. We also think it’s an interesting way to continue the debate over a drink.
By creating this game we got some new insights on typologies. A typology is an answer to the needs for a specific group of people. Therefore a typology will continue to attract that same group. So basically typologies make a city static. If so, should we continue to think in terms of typology?

Next map shows all the public housing projects in relation to the poverty rate. The results are striking. Even while the city has historically strived to achieve a mix of incomes in public housing, almost two third of PH residents live in concentrated poverty. Possible explanations are the past of racial discrimination, the persistent building on the economical least desirable locations, the modernist urban design ideas and the political failure to created mixed income. Concentration of poverty has a serious impact on unemployment, education, crime, etc. Off course throughout time deconcentration of poverty created a challenge for urban planners. But why do these ideas miss implementation? Can we develop a radical new system of public housing to deconcentrate poverty?

Presentation of the theme 'Living Models', by Camiel Van Noten, Pieter Van den Poel and Koen Moesen.
Presented at GSAPP Columbia University on Wed. 9/28.

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