COVER PAGE
CONTENTS (Image from High-Rise to Horizon)
HIGH-RISE TO HORIZON (2009 Chicago Prize Entry with Matthew Ducharme-Smith)
Skyscraper Infrastructure and the New Public Realm
Chicago pioneered commodities speculation in 1848 by establishing the world’s first exchange for futures contracts on physical goods. In subsequent decades the City rapidly developed into a massive metropolitan machine of factories, rail yards and freight facilities that transformed North America’s natural resources into liquid assets.
Less than forty years after the Board of Trade opened Chicago’s architects invented the steel frame ‘Skyscraper’ to overcome geographic limitations imposed by the growth of industry. Skyscrapers soon became a speculative urban typology in their own right. Despite the eventual decline of heavy industry, expansive suburban sprawl and the infectious abandonment of several core neighborhoods, Chicago continued to build the world’s tallest buildings for more than a hundred years. The skyscraper typology reached its zenith at the beginning of the 21st Century as unprecedented real estate speculation simultaneously pushed the City’s core higher while pulling the suburban fringe deeper into Illinois farmland.
By 2050 architecture will radically redefine relationships between public infrastructure, private space, sustainability and culture. Under the parameters of a new urban paradigm, all space above 200’ will be reserved for a public realm of alternative energy production. The site of the Chicago Spire, an unrealized 2000’ tall monument to private wealth, will be transformed into a deep water pumping station that serves hundreds of Algae Bio-Reactors in the abandoned superstructure of the City’s skyline. As an integral piece of Chicago’s energy infrastructure, the Streeterville Pumping Station will expose the essential life-sustaining systems of the built environment and inspire a direct reconsideration of cultural values by fusing ritual and infrastructure. The massive void left by the unrealized Spire will become an axis of integration between subterranean water turbines and a public performance and event space. Ultimately this cross-section will define a new urban typology for the 21st Century.
ERIE CANAL STUDIO (With Michael Bell of Columbia University)
While Detroit epitomizes an industrial model of central organization and authoritative attention to work, Manhattan has evolved as a panorama of cultural imagery, entertainment and lifestyle consumption. Detroit is thus characterized as a void that faces away from itself – a city that is still exploding from its center. By contrast Manhattan is understood as contiguous solid that faces inwards, perpetually admiring itself without attention or concern for the source of its own wealth. The intention of my work was to introduce an external element into the bubble of Manhattan Island by providing an opportunity for New York City to reintegrate itself with the processes of production.
New Yorkers enjoy perhaps the greatest organic food culture of any major city in the United States. Unfortunately this food is typically grown in rural regions hundreds of miles from the city’s concrete canyons. With respect to sustainable living practices and general food security, New Yorkers should arguably consider producing a great percentage of their own food locally. Such is the intention of this project.
The Manhattan School is an origin point, a training facility and a processing station for the growth of a city-wide network of urban agricultural practices. The building itself intentionally conflates industrial scalar analogies (grain elevators for example) with a small-scale movement. Certain agricultural items are expected to be produced at dispersed locations around the city [on window sills and rooftops for example] while other operations like livestock and large-scale cash crops necessitate a significant degree of centralized organization.
Like the Island of Manhattan, the architecture of the School is conceived as a fusion of advanced technology and rugged industrial spaces. The building metaphorically functions as a factory cloaked in a high-performance glass curtain wall. A juxtaposition of refined elements with crude programmatic functions intentionally establishes a condition where high-end architecture confronts natural processes. The tower ultimately reaches a height of ‘566 above sea level, the exact elevation of Lake Erie and the City of Detroit. The façade of the tower was thus designed as a section through the canal, with glass and stone cascading from the top down rather than the bottom up. For all of its recent wealth and glamour Manhattan is not immune from adversity or decline. Ultimately this building projects itself as a monument to this fragility.
DIGITAL FABRICATION
For the final project of a Digital Fabrication course teams of three students were asked to complete a series of exercises ultimately leading to the design and fabrication of a wall system. My partners and I began with a form that was easily readjusted within an ordering system to produce an infinite variety of resulting configurations. We assumed that the final product would be cast in concrete and should therefore consider strengths and weaknesses of the material. We also decided that the resulting wall system should perform a function other than dividing space and modulating light. For the third criteria we decided to explore the formal possibilities generated through the necessity of holding a bottle of wine in multiple positions.
The derivation of form thus began with a simple diamond block that could be stacked in a variety of orientations. The volumes of several wine bottles were then subtracted from the block. The shape was ultimately refined to produce a sinuous shape. A variety of options were considered and prototyped with the intention of progressively reducing the unit to its lightest, most fluid form. Upon production, however, we began to encounter limits to form-making, namely the use of double curved surfaces that we could not produce at full scale using the available milling technology.
TOLEDO INDUSTRIAL ARTS LIBRARY (Landscape Studio)
As the culmination of a studio concerned with physical and cultural landscapes, first year Masters of Architecture students were asked to design an library adjacent to the Toledo Museum of Art. Though given a relatively small program, the Library was charged with reorganizing an entire city block at a critical junction between disparate street grids, neighborhoods and building typologies.
Within this context I attempted to create a project that was not only a repository of knowledge but a place of industrial art production. More specifically, the library was imagined as an embryonic space where craft and cottage industries are remembered, explored and reinvigorated in effort to reestablish local, self-sufficient economies in the shell of a post-industrial society.
NATATORIUM + CLIMBING WALL
As the culmination of a studio concerned with physical and cultural landscapes, first year Masters of Architecture students were asked to design an library adjacent to the Toledo Museum of Art. Though given a relatively small program, the Library was charged with reorganizing an entire city block at a critical junction between disparate street grids, neighborhoods and building typologies.
Within this context I attempted to create a project that was not only a repository of knowledge but a place of industrial art production. More specifically, the library was imagined as an embryonic space where craft and cottage industries are remembered, explored and reinvigorated in effort to reestablish local, self-sufficient economies in the shell of a post-industrial society.
EXTERIOR CLADDING SYSTEM FOR AN ART ORGANIZATION
SECOND NATURE IN THE THIRD CITY
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