︎inFRASTRUCTUREexCHANGE
spring 2017
Infrastructural
systems of waste management and energy production are often built in isolation
or at distance, deemed inaccessible or undesirable components of the city
despite their integral function.
To consider
these processes as part of a closed loop system is to integrate them with other
production flows, establishing a network of waste and energy processes
previously linked only by long-distance truck drives and convoluted paths of
transportation ensuring an outsourced of the undesirable from the city.
Systems thinking
is a cohesive consideration of interrelated parts to create an
‘ecologically-reflexive’ approach to urban systems. Programs are choreographed based on their
inputs and outputs, factoring social intervention and community needs in along
with the waste management and energy production systems. These systems are fundamental to a city’s
homeostasis, but are often out of sight.
This building attempts to render them not only visible, but interactive,
allowing citizens to see how they factor into the industrial narrative of their
city; where their waste goes, how it is processes, and how energy, food, and
education can be a product.
We touch the
earth lightly, respecting its sensitive state.
Located on a
brownfields site, we advocate for wetlands restoration through expansion of its
eroded edges, and a minimized footprint to leave as much of the site untouched
as possible.
The building is conservative,
raised on a compacted bermed footprint that lends to the natural movement of
the raw materials, disappearing into the landscape symbolically as a
demonstration of how its products gives back to the site it sits on.
The structure’s
two faces reflect adjacent contexts: the industrial façade abutting bordering
industrial properties modest but layered by its expanding interactions, a mesh
membrane blurring flows, accepting and expelling vehicles and products for
transport. The pastoral edge moves back
and forth, in a push-and-pull with the adjacent natural landscape, where glazed
greenhouses, classrooms, and a panoramic market are placed in direct
conversation with the landscape.
Between the two
sides of the building, a strip of glass; a webbing together with bridges and flexible
open atrium that link parallel roles of production, spaces of consumption and
spaces of production and observation.
From the industrial street corner to the
wetlands edge meeting the LI sound, a gradated reveal of the way these two
polar spaces and processes can be linked symbiotically. Enter at the most public street intersection,
follow through the branched flows of process and product, and emerge at the far
end where the building melts into the land.
︎in collaboration with
Bernadette McCrann, Julian Usman, Maria DiDomenico
