d e si g n / sp a c es
W W II L LL L C CA AO O C CO O LL U UM MB B II A A G G SS A A PP PP
des i g n / sp a c e s
WILL CAO COLUMBIA GSAPP
air / earth
common / ground
ontologies
SCHOOL(S) YARD, HARLEM + MORNINGSIDE HEIGHTS, NYC critic: LINDY ROY Morningside Park sits at the crux of barriers; some natural and defined over millennia, such as the vein of Manhattan schist running along the length of the park, others administrative and yet to be reconciled, such as the largely racially-based grading of surrounding neighborhoods by the Home Owners Loan Corporation over much of the early 20th century. Along 122nd Street, the unfortunate practice of redlining neighborhoods is replicated through school districting, where neighboring public, private, and charter schools demonstrate radically different student performance.
2 - 19
To begin to overcome an inhospitable history and landscape, the first step of the intervention ameliorates the steep drop in elevation between P.S.36 and the former Horace Mann-Lincoln School of Teachers’ College. Each building receives a frontage above and below the generated surface, allowing opportunities for outdoor play and shelter for shared amenities over and under formerly impassible ground.
form / work MONTESSORI SCHOOL, LOWER EAST SIDE, NYC critic: KARLA ROTHSTEIN
20 - 35
Public education has focused on implementing benchmarks and standardized testing in order to assess performance and parity of schools. Data can only serve as an indicator, however, and the greater impression a school has as a community institution cannot be summarized by math scores and reading levels alone. Although the involvement of metrics was intended to promote greater equality in school performance, these approaches instead reinforce class and cultural divisions through the creation of separate special education and English as a second language classrooms, and have been counterproductive towards embracing neurodiversity. Through changes in curriculum and architecture, schools might instead serve as “soft formworks,” providing support where needed, but ultimately allowing children to become independent beings shaped by their innate strengths and natural integrity.
town / house AFFORDABLE HOUSING, SOUTH BRONX, NYC critic: MIMI HOANG
land / water ecologies
Belied by the hundreds of townhouses that were developed in the Bronx at the turn of century, the promise or “American Dream” of home-owning and home-making was not extended to the many black and brown residents that arrived to the Bronx through the HOPE IV program. Surviving fragments of this earlier era of speculation remain scattered among many blocks of the Bronx, even as many were razed by Robert Moses for highways or otherwise endangered by the flooding these infrastructures exacerbated. Despite the value of its scale and interface with the street, the townhouse plan evidences the act of finding and making a home too readily warped by uncritical ownership and overeager speculation, emblemized by the parti wall. Air is pushed within to create semi-outdoor terraces shared between units in the same way townhouses can create a “close” in between, functioning as both the structural “core” and programmatic “cœur” of each building.
38 - 47
shore / line ESTUARY REGENERATION, SOUTH END, BRIDGEPORT, CT critic: RACHELY ROTEM partner: BURCU TURKAY Although power lines across Connecticut tap into the waste-to-energy and gas plants in the South End of Bridgeport, the consequences of filling the original coastal salt marshes with toxic waste and paving them into parking lots fall upon the neighborhood’s mostly Black and Latinx human residents and its dwindling non-human inhabitants. High flood insurance premiums discourage investment, extending flood vulnerability and strained access to affordable and nutritious food. Rewilding vacant parcels and underutilized parking lots restores the flexibility for water to flow both out and in, reviving an ecology that supported and will support sustenance, allowing the South End to stay afloat both in presence and absence of a flooding event.
48 - 67
e a rth
air
Morningside Park sits at the crux of barriers; some natural and defined over millennia, such as the vein of Manhattan schist running along the length of the park, others administrative and yet to be reconciled, such as the largely racially-based grading of surrounding neighborhoods by the Home Owners Loan Corporation over much of the early 20th century. Along 122nd Street, the unfortunate practice of redlining neighborhoods is replicated through school districting, where neighboring public, private, and charter schools demonstrate radically different student performance. To begin to overcome an inhospitable history and landscape, the first step of the intervention ameliorates the steep drop in elevation between P.S.36 and the former Horace Mann-Lincoln School of Teachers’ College. Each building receives a frontage above and below the generated surface, allowing opportunities for outdoor play and shelter for shared amenities over and under formerly impassible ground.
com m o n / g ro u n d
The high ridge was once the stage where Washington’s Continental Army pushed British lines southward during the Battle of Harlem Heights. A century later, it obliged Andrew Haswell Green to conclude that it would be “very expensive” and “very inconvenient” to extend the Manhattan grid, leading him to recommend a park for the area prior to incorporation by the City of New York in 1870. The disruption was highlighted through disjointed planning passed back-and-forth between Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, delineating their signature winding paths with a French curve, and Jacob Wrey Mould, fortifying the turning west edge of the park with a 40-foot stone rampart replete with turrets overlooking present-day Harlem. These past design decisions limit and complicate access for humans, black or white, yet the shadow they cast offers refuge for bees, capable of flying 4,000 feet in the air but confined to ever-dwindling unbuilt and unpaved areas on the island.
GRANT HOUSES
MORNINGSIDE GARDENS
TEACHER'S COLLEGE
COLUMBIA CAMPUS
Decennial Census
Block-Level American Community Survey 5- year Estimates, 2016-2021
Population identifying as “Black Alone.” Over the next 250 years from Reconstruction to the present, Harlem, called “Muscota” or “place of rushes” by the Lenape and “Vredendal” or “peaceful dale” by 17thcentury Dutch settlers, became the “Black Mecca” of the world, as proudly proclaimed by Alaine Locke during the Harlem Renaissance.
Population identifying as “White Alone.” Along the park’s south edge at 110th Street, an elevated rail line previously enabled access to many black households migrating from the American South before it was demolished. Its north edge at 123rd Street was the line the HOLC drew in the sand. Now, these more commercial both are the sites of a relatively recent demographic shift.
Student Housing Units. In part, this can be attributed to limited university housing that leads students to seek inexpensive housing elsewhere.
Vacant Units. Additionally the Great Recession and the COVID-19 pandemic had disproportionate impacts that displaced black residents.
fences
connections
underperfoming
overshadowed
membrane
terrain
The site topography is graded into a surface that can be traversed over and entered under. Moments for street trees are carved out along the street edge of the new surface. Recycled plastic embedded in the material act as fiber optics, allowing light and presence to penetrate mass.
Public education has focused on implementing benchmarks and standardized testing in order to assess performance and parity of schools. Data can only serve as an indicator, however, and the greater impression a school has as a community institution cannot be summarized by math scores and reading levels alone. Although the involvement of metrics was intended to promote greater equality in school performance, these approaches instead reinforce class and cultural divisions through the creation of separate special education and English as a second language classrooms, and have been counterproductive towards embracing neurodiversity. Through changes in curriculum and architecture, schools might instead serve as “soft formworks,” providing support where needed, but ultimately allowing children to become independent beings shaped by their innate strengths and natural integrity.
f o r m / w ork
impression : exchange :: registration : accumulation picture books > printmaking > education
casting is volumetric printing.
prints from formwork linings.
ground : figure :: void : form :: air : earth Consider space from 2-D to 3-D, from 3-D to material.
earth : air :: form : void :: figure : ground And vise versa.
soft formworks mold impresses material, material impresses mold
soft classrooms in form and function for teacher and student