Ground floor plan
Third floor plan
Bronx Housing
Units models
Units diagram
Zoom-in floor plan
Model
Axonometric
Site analysis
Academic Work
Columbia GSAPP 2017
Instructor Mario Gooden, Huff + Gooden Architects, Dark Space
Site: Bronx, NY
Partner: Juan Marcos Arriaza
“In vain, great-hearted Kublai, shall I attempt to describe Zaira, city of high bastions. I could tell you how many steps make up the streets rising like stairways, and the degree of the arcades' curves, and what kind of zinc scales cover the roofs; but I already know this would be the same as telling you nothing. The city does not consist of this, but of relationships between the measurements of its space and the events of its past (...)
The city, however, does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand, written in the corners of the streets, the gratings of the windows, the banisters of the steps, the antennae of the lightning rods, the poles of the bags, every segment marked in turn with scratches, indentations, scrolls.”
Invisible Cities, Italo Calvino
If, as Marco Polo states, the city contains its history not only in the constructions themselves, but also in their use and decay, how could we systematize the reading of this information? The city would then act as an index of the marks and scratches resulting from the action of bodies, a screen left with the imprints of the bodies and events experienced by the community through time.
The street is taken as stage, as event space, and the envelope of our housing project starts to react and adjust to the events observed in the sidewalks and streets. It folds inwards to accommodate aggregation of people on the bus stop, it curves around the corner to allow for a plaza-like space that faces the park, it turns into a canopy where the site encounters a school, so that there is a covered space for the children to gather or for their parents to wait for them.
Similar operation happens at the level of the unit, where walls curve to accommodate a mother soothing her baby, or when a wall breaks to allow a couple to embrace.
The shaping of envelope and units happens in four movements. An ordinary event is staged in a sentence, which is then transgressed by changing the subject of the action from the person to the architecture. The settings for the events are separated in urban and domestic, each intended to shape units and building envelope respectively.
The scenarios generate a catalogue of units and envelopes that when combined shape each other.
In Tschumi’s words, “here it is not a question of knowing which comes first, movement or space, which molds the other, for ultimately deep binding is involved.”