ceci est une pipe

Box Office

Micro interiors as a commentary on macro phenomena.

Procedural Polygon Modeling in 3dsMax 2010

Co-Adaptation 15

The third hurdle is the architecture contractual apparatus itself. The architectural contract, perhaps ultimately derived from Alberti’s notions on the division between thought and action, can only deliver a static object. A fi nite set of documents in fi nite delivery time, garnering a singular decisive act.

To be able to truly author processes, the contract must be drawn out to allow for future infl uence, operation, or even revision. This entails an increased intimacy between client and architect. It means a higher level of trust, and a prolonged relationship, the ideas of which most on both sides would probably blanch at. However, clients would benefi t from increased attention and higher quality of service, and architect’s would not mind the more stable work. Of course, this entails that the architect is capable of making and admitting mistakes, which can be precarious in the current model. However, altering the contract means that both the client and architect know more about the other’s intents and are therefore on the same page and ultimately the same team. A symbiosis rather than a partnership based on necessity.

Conventional professional relationships and traditional ideology have left us with a spatial construct many have dubbed ‘suburbia.’ It has become fashionable, or even traditional, to deride suburban sprawl as inherently evil, but there is a darth of constructive thought and intelligent action aiming to ‘fi x’ it. We all know what the problems are, but few have posited viable solutions. Could it be that this is a problem that architecture, urban planning, and landscape design are too small to address? If ‘suburbia’ is outside the jurisdiction of those most suited to ‘fi xing’ it, then who is responsible?

Rather than utopian pipe dreams, or yet more negative cynical ‘junk-theory’, a series of intelligent, non-biased, design-as-research based projections could fi ll a void and fuel architectural thought for the next fi fty years.

Co-Adaptation 14

Viability

Given further economic development, detail refi nement, and some thoughtful value engineering, this project could be entirely technologically possible.

However, due to current thought processes, design methodologies and legal constructs, it is unviable under the current status quo.
What needs to change in order for liminal space to be dramatically reconceived from waste to opportunity?
One issue is the differentiation between design disciplines and the categorical mindsets that differentiation breeds. This project is not a work of architecture, landscape design, urban planning, agriculture, real estate speculation or civil engineering. Rather it is a confl uence of these disciplines interrelated in a tightly woven and perhaps inextricable way. To begin to think of the built environment as an ecology in dynamic equilibrium rather than as a series of adjacent plots, we must begin to author processes rather than design objects. This frees us from tired debates of style versus substance, utility versus poetics, and ridiculous and false dichotomies between art and science or pure and applied teleogies. It allows us to activate and evaluate built space in a more objective fashion, based on performance and reason, rather than on style or subjective opinion.

The second criteria is notions of ownership. Whether the area in question is owned by the municipality, the government, commercial or private enterprises, the owner must cease to conceive of these sites as their backyard dumping ground and be willing to exploit their potential. This is in no way antithetical to real estate speculation or economic use patterns, rather it is the exact opposite as it opens up new and fertile ground for economic endeavors. This is the ‘waste equals food’ mantra applied spatially. The real estate crisis, coupled with rising costs of transportation and infrastructure means that a more dense urban space model is perhaps more economically sustainable.

Co-Adaptation 13

Co-Adaptation 12

Site plan / Phasing

Perhaps due to Alberti, perhaps due to gross misinterpretations of Modernism, the contemporary
architecture contract is always delivered as a fi nite product. As a break from this, iterations are
proposed to enable dynamic responses to changes in program. This is less architecture as product
and more architecture as ecological process. Being able to surgically alter, amend and adapt tectonics
allows for massive increases or decreases in program over time, ensures a very limited waste of
material and engenders architectural awareness.
Conceived as a fi fty year project, the system allows for increases of housing as more workers and
researchers are needed, and, reciprocally, more growing space to shelter the houses. The system
and its output, trees, “grow” along the highway, in either direction. Essentially, domesticating plants
and planting the domestic.

Co-Adaptation 11

Structure

Geodetics as both a tectonic system and organizational logic, are perhaps the most effi cient means
of achieving our aims. Standard stick frame construction, using slab, column and beam, is simply
too clumsy and thick to engage the complex geometry of the site. While monocoques, though seemingly
dynamic, are actually too static to change over time. Geodetics are built with standardized
members using designed fl exibility at the joints. Depending on assembly, the same pieces might
serve intermittently as wall, fl oor or roof.
Here we see this at work in two scales: the roof is comprised of a standard, ‘rod and ball’ system
[with acrylic sheets stretched over it], the torque provides rigidity. At a larger scale, the ‘truss web’
works in a similar manner, wherein each truss performs as a rod. The roof provides protection for
the young plants while allowing sunlight, and the truss web supports the topographical and topological
surface upon which events play out.

Co-adaptation 10

Distribution

A commercial distribution center serves as the counter point to the cultural center. Since it is too dangerous, potentially requiring more on-ramp than is possible in the site constraints, trucks access the site from local streets rather than highway. This has the added benefi t of serving as the entry from the local neighbourhood, which nullifi es the separation between distributor and consumer. The system of the tree farm is organized radially around the distribution point to optimize transfer of material over area. The trucks align on an over large cul-de-sac, that staple of residential planning, to facilitate ease of access.

Co-Adaptation 09

Retail

Not unlike the Italian ‘Autogrill’ the center, situated along the highway like a rest stop, provides an unexpected point of entry. Comprised of the research laboratories, a cafe, retail and education displays and a product collection point, the center serves as the public face of the site. It is here, along the highway, that people engage in social public space. One can park, tour the laboratories, pick up a young tree, sip some fair trade coffee, or venture further down the site to investigate the growing trays and a fi rst hand experience of the process. Juxtaposed with eighteen wheelers rumbling by at 65 mph makes the center’s civic and cultural role more pertinent and poignant. It allows one to access, inhabit and escape from a ‘concrete island.’ An urban space that is most typically invisible.

Co-Adaptation 08

Housing

Prefabrication is not a new model, but its opportunities and limitations have yet to be fully explored as either single or multi family housing in the American market. The benefi ts of pre-fab are that as it is assembled in a controlled environment it can be constructed in a quicker, more accurate process, ultimately yielding a higher quality product for less investment. Detractors often cite it as a totalizing, one-size-fi ts-all construct, allowing for limited options and permutations. However, thought of as a range or class of designs, a typology, pre-fab can create different organizations for specific conditions.

Co-Adaptation 07

Growing Tray

Ecology-
Contemporary vernacular thought regarding the relationship between ecology and ‘man made’ built space is still plagued by two interrelated misconceptions. The first is that the artificial and the natural are somehow differentiated. Environmental ecology is applied as a gloss over autonomous construction as an aesthetic or ‘green-washing’ manuver. This project approaches this relationship from the opposite angle, which is to say that ecological phenomena and man-made artifacts are codependent on social, economic and political levels.

The second fallacy is the distance between ecology {read: resource extraction and waste dispersal] and most people’s sphere of consciousness. Production, distribution and waste dispersal practices are all but invisible to most everyone in society, the only point of interaction, and consequently influence, is the point of consumption. By placing ecological process in close knit juxtaposition with inhabitation, it fosters consumer awareness and so yields more control over choices.

Here we see the growing trays which allow seedlings to be grown on an artifi cial surface. The trays are optimized for different spatial requirements at different stages in the growth cycle. They are pre-fabricated and standardized to fit within the armature, allowing more or less of a particular type as needs require.

Co-Adaptation 06

Layers

Rather than one over-arching logic, applied in a totalizing manner, the tectonics must be designed around many interrelated, mutually dependent organizations. This allows them to perform their unique functions while sharing a deep reciprocity with each other and the site conditions. This is material tectonics as spatial analogy for networked yet determined fl ows, as opposed to aesthetic
metaphor.

Co-Adaptation 05

Program

Inhabitation, Culture, Research, Production, Distribution, Consumption

In order to access and occupy the remote and harsh zone of an interchange multiple programs are necessary. No single program arranged
in a monoculture could possibly survive on its own. Each program and use therefore has a reciprocal and integral relationship with each other. They rely on each other in a symbiosis that allows them to perform to their potential. Housing provides more permanent dwellings for the researchers and farmers and transient accommodation for agro-tourists, which increases awareness on a visceral and experiential level. The tree farm and its infrastructure protects the housing with sound attenuation and carbon sequestration. Research areas develop strands of tree that grow straighter, are less prone to disease and sequest carbon at faster rates. Commercial space interfaces with the public, creating a sense of place while providing education thereby improving awareness, and contributing economic resources. Distribution facilitates growth of the system by
providing a collection point from which to transplant trees that are ready to be planted, whether along the highway or to points beyond.
Cross programming, not only makes sense on economic and ecological levels, but is vital to the project’s existence. The separation and
division of program is primarily what creates liminal space; it is fi tting that programmatic weaving offers the alternative.

Co-Adaptation 04

Autonomous Tectonics

Autonomous tectonics are intentionally designed in a vacuum. They are often conceived and created for a singular purpose, to be applied simply in various contexts and scales. In this model, pure engineering and fi xed assembly line repetitive construction practices dictate forms and geometry regardless of place and time. In a Fordist ‘one size fi ts all’ mantra, the designed object in inherently placeless, as it ‘fi ts’ equally well or poorly with its context. Highway infrastructure, with the primary goal of facilitating an automobile’s direction at a certain rate of speed, is placeless. Autonomous tectonics are imperialistic: they require that the site respond to them. As the model for infrastructure, and some urban planning, for the past 100 years, the coming challenge will be how to fi t into and mediate timeless and placeless
fi xed geometries.

Co-adaptive Tectonics

Co-adaptive tectonics are defined by a shared reciprocity with their given context. They are intimately site specific. Also, termed ‘mass-customization,’ these Post-Fordist assembly methodologies enable a class or range of objects that fi t together to respond to sites specifi cally. They are determinately non-linear, and intelligent and self refl exive enough to respond to local conditions, geometries, and mandates. Toshio Shibata’s photography illustrates a fl exible, adaptive organization that responds to specific needs. The conditions of the site, whether economic, ecologic, social, cultural or political inform the tectonics and then the tectonics enable strategic operation on the site.

Pseudo-Topographic Heightfield Imaging

Co-Adaptation 03

Organizational Logics
Any architectural or urban planning project is an exercise in organization. However, and particularly in architecture, there is often one or a few set of primary ideas that facilitate the project. T wo or three logics often determine the over-arching organization of the building. This is typically quite conducive for the process and is a mechanism to identify and solve problems. However, when jumping up in scale to the issue of wasted land, there are often many pre-existing organizing logics already at play in the site. The challenge then becomes: how to dovetail with existing logics, whilst augmenting them in a beneficial manner. Some potential logics are not spatial [viz, some are better accessed through lists of data, than by geometry], however our purposes at the moment are only concerned with spatial logics, some of which are detailed above.

Co-Adaptation 02

Site

Interchange 68 is the name of the confluence of interstate transport that is the transition between I-95 and I-80. As the junction for two of the longest and highest volume highways on the eastern seaboard [I-95 runs from Boston to Atlanta, and I-80 heads out from New York to Pittsburgh and eventually Chicago and points west.], it’s proximity of 6 miles from Manhattan, and comprising an area roughly the size of Central Park, interchange 68 provides fertile testing ground for provoking liminal space.



Dividing Teaneck New Jersey to the north and Ridgefield Park to the south, the interchange, a threshold and connector by automobile, poses a huge physical barrier to any other form of terrestrial transport. To access and occupy the site, a new level of connective tissue is required at a finer scale. An artificial topography, any new graft of armature must be reflexive and adaptive in time and space. It must intelligently respond to changes in elevation and proximity to the highway and neighbourhood fabric. The challenge becomes scalar. Is it possible to intelligently and productively mediate the local neighbourhood space [designed for a sense of place] with interstate infrastructure [designed for velocity]?