Urban Reef: A Housing Proposal for New York

Add To Collection

Urban Reef: A Housing Proposal for New York

The
project is a housing proposal for the Hudson Yards area of New York. Occupied
by a train depot, the site acts as a physical division that prohibits any
connections of the Midtown part of Manhattan to the Hudson River.
Urban
Reef addresses this problem of localized ground discontinuity and programmatic
and physical isolation within a larger urban area, by proposing a highly
connected 3D network of housing integrated with commercial as well as
recreational uses. Working to a brief of 3,000 housing units, the normative
isolated high-rise building type found in New York, is replaced by a series of
mid rise buildings that incline to minimize structural spans and interconnect
in order to maximize the area available for housing and communal space
development, effectively enhancing social integration.
The
proposal attempts to reinvent the idea of public space and to interiorize parts
of what could potentially be an oversized open green space at groundlevel,
into the centre of the building as well as in the horizontal connections
between the buildings, transforming these spaces into catalysts for communal
urban living as a series of public attractors nested within the 3D housing network.
On
an urban scale, the organisational logic inherent in Maya hair dynamics is used
to optimize the path network of connections between a series of infrastructural
nodes around the site and subsequently to generate a series of ground plane
apertures that define the positioning and height of the buildings’ vertical
circulation cores. Of a number of possible scenarios for the allocation of
buildings between the circulation paths, the one selected is with a continuous
mass of housing buildings from midtown Manhattan to the Hudson River, a gesture
that provides programmatic incentives (green spaces and retail areas at ground
level) for people to walk through the site, connecting thus the heart of
Manhattan to its otherwise ‘natural’ outlet, the riverside pedestrian
paths.
On a
building scale, research on optimized fibre structures informs the design of
the buildings, with this structural optimization allowing for the building core
to be accessed via a full slab only every twelve meters, liberating the floors
above and below while creating internal voids for green spaces to be placed
around the lift core. As a by-product of the existence of these green spaces
internally, a series of interstitial spaces or semiprivate balconies
overlooking the green area enhance interaction between the occupants of the
surrounding housing units.
Furthermore, research on natural
systems and more specifically the coral reef model as an example of an adaptive
ecology that is defined by local relationships, the coral growth principle of
increased growth rate at areas of high curvature is used to inform the
distribution and positioning of the housing units
within the proposed network, while the fusion principle is investigated to differentiate
the housing typology according to the parameters of height, orientation and position
in the site.