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.
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]?
“New Jersey State Highway Dept.
That zero panorama seemed to contain ruins in reverse, that is – all the new construction that would eventually be built. This is the opposite of the ‘romantic ruin’ because the buildings don’t fall into ruin after they are built but rather rise into ruin before they are built. This anti-romantic mise-en-scene suggests the discredited idea of time and many other “out of date” things. But the suburbs exist without a rational past and without the “big events” of history. Oh, maybe there are a few statues, a legend, and a couple of curios, but no past – just what passes for a future. A Utopia minus a bottom, a place where machines are idle, and the sun has turned to glass, and a place where the Passaic Concrete Plant (253 River Drive) does a good business in STONE, BITUMINOUS, SAND, and CEMENT. Passaic seems full of “holes” compared to New York City, which seems tightly packed and solid, and those holes in a sense are the monumental vacancies that define, without trying, the memory traces of an abandoned set of futures.”
-Robert Smithson, Monuments of Passaic
The urban periphery is defined more by what it is not than by what it is.
The horizontal stratification of urban space into zones of singular purposes has forged pervasive intermediary tracts. Dubbed the ‘holey plane’[1], these zones facilitate control, separation and flexibility. Without inherent moral value, they are one outcome of processes whose effects also include a breakdown of public space, ecological destruction, banality, economic unfeasibility, and architectural homogeneity. Their role is to contain waste, hold matter, move through, and separate uses. Bodily inhabitation is often impossible, displeasurable, and sometimes dangerous.
Liminality is ripe for rethinking. What would it mean to revise ‘drosscape,’ not as “waste”, but as opportunity for dense inhabitation?[2] Can we envision a re-grafting of domestic, infrastructural and productive spaces into a symbiosis rather than a contravention? Rather than expanding outwards, can we expand inwards?
This pamphlet addresses these concerns by synthesizing competing organizational logics. It envisions altering the architectural design process, contractual apparatuses, tectonics, and urban planning. As a break from static contemporary construction contracts, the design schedule is re-thought to conceptualize the architecture project not as a product, but as a series of interrelated interventions that both operate on, and are informed by, the site and use. Novel tectonics are employed as the physical armature that engenders cynosural change.
The frontier is literally in our cities.
