The Grand Interior

Today, digital technologies are undeniably modifying the way we use and live in the city. Due to the actual cyber reality, the classic dichotomies between public-private, collective-individual, night-day spaces… that characterized a great part of the architectural discourse of the twentieth century, have lost their connotation. Today, Architecture cannot be understood detached from an interconnected reality, where buildings, more than isolated entities, are part of a larger system of common spaces and services that link the micro with the macro, having consequences on the social, the economical and the environmental at large.

The increasing mix among public and private spheres, allows us to think of the world as a continuous interior or following Sloterdijk’s image as a ‘grand interior’, an endless domestic landscape defined by spaces, objects and technologies, where the public space is being redefined, moving from the archetype of the street—as the paradigm of the common—to a more complex situation where public and private merge all along the city. In this scenario, the home is also becoming part of this public realm.

This new public condition might be an opening to rethink preset architectural limits and urban classifications that were used to assure benefit in detriment of social rights. Architecture has been traditionally used as a tool to define and perpetuate colonial processes. It is an effective agent of restraint able to assure the power of certain social sectors over others. It is not neutral and it might consequently be perceived as such. Not only has the division of public private has been a driving force for the development of biased social structures, but also other processes of urban planning and building.

In Core I, we understand the shift of public space as an invitation to redefine social structures for a better common welfare. We address the course looking to our actual and close reality, taking the everyday life of Broadway Avenue, Manhattan, as a starting point and base for an architectural proposal. We look at buildings and their urban context, understanding the quotidian as a platform for a deeper research that allows us to comprehend the complexity of the built realm, its actual functioning and requirements in relation to economic, climatic, environmental, social and political issues. And we design Architectures that answer to those realities: transgressing, empowering, complementing, … existing networked spaces. We produce architecture from the urban towards the detail, from the drawing towards the construction, and during that path we always foster graphical, formal and material experimentation as an intrinsic part of the design process.

The studio employed a lens of historical criticality while analyzing Broadway and its surroundings from Houston Street to 30th Street. The region—comprising three historical districts: Noho, Flatiron, and Madison Square North—was approached through temporal overlays. The studio was guided by pivotal events spanning from Broadway as a thoroughfare originally known as the Wesquaegeek Trail, to the 300 acres of African-owned farms known as Land of the Blacks under Dutch colonial rule centered around present-day Washington Square Park, and the East Village/Noho artist movement of the 1980s in which artists shifted the public consciousness. Through orthographic cuts, students dissected history as a stack, understanding the flow of placement and displacement of land and belonging in the horizontal plane. The studio theme, Cutting Through, sought to unveil and reveal historical and contemporary truths hiding in plain sight. Students presented concepts utilizing the architectural convention of the cut. Namely, they used horizontal and vertical cuts to reveal the significance of their conceptual provocations on public space.

Manhattan Island has been likened to a charged vector, with weighted significance to its southern “pole”: the symbolic, historic, and financial gateway to the Western Hemisphere. Washington Heights, which culminates at the George Washington Bridge’s maelstrom, is itself the Northern Gateway—the inverted “other” axis—that extends inland from Harlem to Albany. Like some ghosted opposing force, the “weight” of the North remains somewhat unexpressed in our mainstream imagination—until now. Like Dark Matter, which is expressed in ways both enigmatic and outside the mainstream convention, this area—often referred to as the Little Dominican Republic—holds potential for a completely other type of urbanism: one of “inverted” values, expectations, and spatiality to that of the late-capitalist, hegemonically White, metropolis. The Heights is perhaps the most densely “built up” manifestation of the Manhattan grid. Could a starting point of strategies such as removal, subtraction, digging, or undisciplining the Commissioner’s Grid lead to generative urbanism, rooted in sovereignty and the flourishing of life? Borrowing this analogy to physics as a starting point, this studio’s section of Broadway—and indeed, the narrow strip of Manhattan which surrounds it—will serve as inspiration for the exploration of a “Dark” (Black, North, Other…) Spatial Imaginary. Historical polarities include slave uprisings (1712 and 1741) and Crack/BLM Protests (1992 and today), shallow and deep section; north and south, and others will aid us in this endeavor.

The studio focuses on surveying urban voids, accumulating pattern interruptions manifested in abandoned lots in-between buildings, interstitial areas, and terrains adjacent to infrastructures. Urban voids have a direct relationship to major ideological and aesthetical shifts in urban planning and architectural thinking since the late 1960s, culminating in the gentrification of neighborhoods and the continuous spatial re-arrangement of African American communities. In the context of Harlem, a place that once thrived in literature, music, and the arts promoting the cultural movement named Harlem Renaissance between 1910-1930, these tactics continue to significantly impact the availability of housing and public space for the local communities. Once an aesthetical shift is manifested, landlords and developers began marketing and renovating to appeal to wealthier occupants’ tastes. The SOHA (South Harlem) controversy is one example, generating the next exodus of neighbors to more affordable neighborhoods. Students investigated the history of these interruptions, using overlapping techniques of past and new ownership. What and who generated the urban voids? To whom did these plots of land belong before becoming unused? How can they be engaged today as a transcalar resource for local communities of predominantly Latinx and African Americans?

In 1959, President Dwight D. Eisenhower turned earth to start construction on a new cultural center in New York City, the Lincoln Center. The project, which was part of Robert Moses’s urban renewal program, displaced over 7,000 families and 800 businesses. The area, previously called San Juan Hill, was a vibrant and culturally important neighborhood. It was populated first by African-Americans moving from both the southern US and other areas of New York City, and later by Puerto Ricans. The urban renewal project displaced 56% of the community. Most of those who stayed were relocated into the new public housing development, Amsterdam Houses. Similar to other NYCHA projects, the dwellings were formalized as a set of residential towers in a superblock with almost no urban services. The isolation of the complex reflects the challenges of public housing today that struggle with preset sharp physical and economic boundaries. Taking Amsterdam Houses as a paradigm, students in this studio researched and responded to existent urban boundaries that boost social and racial inequalities along the Upper West Side.

Columbia University’s presence dominates the northern portion of this stretch of Broadway and several blocks to the east and west. The university’s strained history with the Black and Hispanic communities of Harlem and Morningside Heights is rooted in a competition for space. The ongoing tension centers around the ability of local residents to maintain control over their living and recreational space in the face of the significant power the university wields as a landlord and through its incremental campus expansion. In 1968 opposition to the Vietnam War and the recent killing of Martin Luther King had already raised tensions on campus when student outrage was triggered by the start of construction of a new $11 million 2.2-acre gym for Columbia students in Morningside Park, the 13-block long public park, a boundary line between the campus and neighboring communities to the east. The building’s two entrances—one for students above and a second small entry for local residents below—set up the segregated intent of the gym and reinforced the broader separation between the university and surrounding communities. This history provided the context for the studio’s exploration of Morningside Park as the area for the invention of new and inclusive formulations for public space.

The highly choreographed infrastructural systems of Lower Manhattan become frayed in our zone. Northern Manhattan has historically functioned at the City’s fringe. Visible power stations, surface parking, elevated subways, original homesteads, and natural landscapes all characterize our section of the City. From the City’s inception, the resources of Upper Manhattan have largely been dedicated to the function and supremacy of Lower Manhattan. Northern Manhattan’s subordinate role to its prodigal southern neighbor isn’t something that evolved by chance; it was designed and has been reinforced through zoning and public policy for centuries. Despite this structural inequity, the neighborhoods of Inwood and Washington Heights coalesced and thrived within the informality and resource scarcity. Known as the Little Dominican Republic, the neighborhoods are home to a significant Latinx population. A recent up-zoning of the area now puts the existing communities at risk of becoming the next frontier of gentrification and cultural erasure. This studio’s challenge was to plan a more just and public approach to the site’s growth, cultivating its assets to the benefit of the existing and future populations in a new Grand Interior.

Lower Manhattan is a dense layering of historic and contemporary spaces and events enmeshed in the creation and protection of value. Along Broadway from Battery Park to Houston, clusters of buildings are currently designated as civic, financial, or for manufacturing; some still representing a link to some of the area’s earliest land uses. Outside the wall, from which we now have Wall Street, used to be The Commons and the African Burial Grounds, two landscapes that were part of everyday life in New York for nearly 200 years. Both sites of exploitation were physically external to New York City, but functioned as the primary means by which the internal prosperity of the city, private property, and material ownership, were enhanced. The studio researched the history and contemporary state of material extraction in architecture and its continued adjacency to the erasure of the contribution to the built environment by Black, Indigenous, and People of Color. Students examined how one site of accumulation along Broadway represents a reciprocal site of occlusion elsewhere. Furthering this analysis, students established a critical approach toward the deconstruction and reconfiguration of this accumulated stone, concrete, brick, steel or glass to ultimately propose a New Commons.

Students researched the social and political history of commercial real estate development in Midtown Manhattan, focusing on specific typologies of commercial architecture and the forms of labor and consumption they have housed. Utilizing real estate listings and other published documentation wherever possible, students then proposed interventions in currently or prospectively vacant commercial spaces. The pandemic has accelerated the emptying of urban commercial space—already underway due to changing patterns of consumption, as well as speculative finance and real estate practices—prefiguring a future in which there are fewer collective commercial spaces—restaurants, stores, offices, etc.—and fewer jobs for the workers who service such spaces. Recognizing the racialized character of American capitalism, in which such labor is disproportionately performed by Black, Indigenous, and People of Color, students proposed new uses for these spaces, utilizing speculative architectural design and representation to build support for alternative futures in which economic security is dissociated from precarious labor, a precondition of equity. Students confronted the limits of architecture, considering the example of the urban loft building, which became a frame for experiments in collective living and working and creative practice in the post-industrial period but also a vector for gentrification, displacement, and the ultimate commodification of those collectives and practices. How are shifting political, economic, and social structures manifest in both the literal, material form of buildings and in the immaterial labor of design? Can architecture—in either sense—contribute to the transformation of such structures? Ultimately, students questioned the assumption that it is, in fact, the role of architecture to speculate on the material conditions of the lives of others, reflecting on how such acts of speculation rest on disciplinary norms and practices that reinforce the privileges of whiteness, as well as gender and class. As they considered how architects might contribute to the construction of a more just and equitable society, they also questioned the labor of architecture itself—its tools, its discourses, its institutions, its aesthetics.