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| mOrphosis.
Newcity Park |
6.1999
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| progetto
di mOrphosis, Santa Monica, CA, USA (collaborazione) New York: CCA Competition for the Design of Cities, concorso bandito dal CCA (Centre Canadien d'Architecture) |
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THE DESIGN PROPOSAL. The central principle of organization is a new kind of public park (Newcity Park) running from Penn Station over the rail yards and into the Hudson River, continuously infused with a great variety of public recreational, private commercial, and cultural, social and educational uses. These activities are positioned in and activate a multi-layered platform -supporting and spatially integrated with the park- and also occupy adjacent buildings continuous with the surface and in places canting over the park to create volumetric enclosures open to the sun. The park, the third largest in the city of New York after Central and Riverside Parks, is oriented according to the true solar east-west axis in order to optimize the penetration of sunlight to its one million square feet of public areas and greenery, and hence it is off the alignment of the urban grid. Newcity Park terminates in a floating beach platform on the Hudson River which supports a variety of year round uses, mostly tied to new hotels serving the Convention Center expansion and to a relocated ferry terminal. Additional private structures for office, commercial, housing, etc. are built in the areas flanking Newcity Park to the north and south (including the Convention Center expansion); they are connected to the park surface above actual grade and integrated into the surrounding built form of the existing city and its present and proposed transportation infrastructure. Some of these buildings are conventional in form, while others derive their unconventional shape from new conditions of connection and support generated by Newcity Park. The park will be served by its own people mover (free to the public) connecting the new Penn Station to the Hudson River. THE PANELS. The panels represent Morphosis's proposal for the competition; they were aimed at clarifying the idea of a dynamic process with multi-scenario responses to varied forces. The traditional city depended on the stability of its economic and productive structure, a relative uniformity of social composition and the concentrated political power of oligarchies. These conditions were translated into a stable, homogeneous, hierarchic spatial organization. It is increasingly difficult today to experience the city as a linear process; it is precisely the instability of the regimes of flexible economic accumulation and the accelerating pace of change that bring the variable conditions of new urban structures to the forefront, putting into question traditional city building strategies. A dynamic process with multi-scenario responses (no fixed solutions) to varied forces is therefore proposed. The proposal was built around lines of connection and displacement, operating in a topological rather than Euclidean mode. Irregular geometries represent the transformations arising from the contained conflict of competing systems – a net where relations between different elements are stressed over the continuous development of a single form. The spatial juxtaposition and programmatic adjacencies in hybrid buildings promote the three-dimensional organization of the city versus its present planimetric organization. |
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