The One-Story City – WORKING DRAFT
Design Studio 5
Masters of Architecture Program
Parsons School of Design
The New School
David Gissen, Professor of Architecture and Urban History
Parsons School of Design
Mondays/Thursdays: 12:10 – 5:50.
Introduction
The density, height, and imposing scale of New York City’s architecture defines the city itself, but most of the structures in New York are much more diminutive. Two and three story structures define many of the City’s neighborhoods, and a recent survey argues that one-story structures may constitute more than 75% of the free-standing buildings in many parts of New York. This latter, “low city” of single-story buildings and its architectural and urban potential is the subject of our studio. Our work will include historical and neighborhood research, experiments in design methodologies, and the development of an architectural and urban proposal for a site in New York.
Why examine the low city? The low city offers a critical lens onto urban architecture, generally, and the architecture of New York, more specifically. The low building was the fabric of urban spaces and cities for millenia. Even during the modernist exploration of the vertical city, numerous architects explored the possibility of low, single-story urban fabrics. Low buildings provided an alternative urban fabric to the tower and slab; they were proposed for disabled, veteran and elderly housing; they more easily engaged their historic surroundings; and they challenged the primacy of economic determinants of urban architecture. In New York, one-story buildings occupy an under-explored aspect of New York City’s neighborhoods. They are used as depots, light industry, commercial spaces, public buildings, for parties, religious buildings, and residential buildings. The interiors of many of these buildings are unusually accessible for both pedestrians and vehicles–with a direct transition between street and interior spaces. Their surroundings often become verdant, and due to the amount of sunlight that their low profile permits in adjacent lots. They are typically brick sheathed and with a steel, concrete, or wooden column and truss structure inside. They are easy to build and modify, and challenge the inherent sense of physical risk that the construction of urban buildings often entails.
We will examine the topic of low building in several different ways: historically, by understanding low buildings as part of a lesser-known urban architecture and that offer a physical, economic, and environmental counterpoint to the urban tower and slab; socially, by understanding the ways these buildings figure in the life of particular neighborhoods in New York; methodologically, by thinking about alternative ways to design, preserve and represent “low” architecture; and critically, by wrestling with the uncertain future of buildings that do not appear to intensify the city’s real-estate economies.
Ultimately, our studio offers a provocation by embracing “low” building, and which involves more than just the height of structures–it is a way to think about history, urban economies and sites, and the way we work and represent our ideas as students of architecture. A key part of the studio will involve us bringing our own individual and collective politics to a consideration of this way of imagining architecture.
Studio Outcomes
- Explore an understudied aspect of urban architecture and history.
- Develop alternative design methods that respond to and emerge from the studio themes.
- Develop collaborative architectural and urban design skills with the studio group.
- Cultivate a critical perspective informed by individual and collective politics, goals and aspirations.
- Develop design methods that are as preservationist as they are interventionist.
- Cultivate connections and interactions with a neighborhood community.
Assessment
- Unit 1 and 2: 25%
- Unit 3: 50%
- Attendance and participation, 25%
Work Plan and Methodologies
Our studio work will be divided into a series of units and with differing projects and methodologies; the first two units are relatively brief, and the final unit is a longer, more traditional studio design project.
UNIT 1: Introduction (Week 1).
In the introductory unit of the studio, we briefly examine histories of low urban buildings globally, and in New York City, more specifically. This will likely be through a brief lecture and discussion and possible museum visit to look at some architecture and urban drawings.
UNIT 2: Bringing the City Down to Size (Weeks 2 to 5 ).
This unit offers a warm-up design exercise by examining lowness as a process – a way of translating and thinking about architecture. Here, we will engage in a provocative and playful approach by taking a series of iconic, tall buildings in New York and translating their qualities into a lower, mostly single-story form. We will make “low” versions of iconic apartment and office towers, a low Guggenheim, a flat “Vessel”, among other examples. In engaging in this work, we will understand how people have critiqued multi-story, tall architecture–for its physical intensity, its economics, its inaccessibility, its massiveness, its environmental impacts. We will also consider how architects have translated the formal, structural, and programmatic aspects of tall buildings into a lower form. Our ultimate intent is to understand how lowness might be a critical response to the automatic association between multi-level structures and architectural and urban complexity and value.
UNIT 3: The Low City and its Future (Weeks 6 to 16).
The final and longest unit focuses on an architectural and urban proposal for one of three sites in New York. Here we will cull ideas from our first two studies–and bring our own work, from on high, down to the ground, so to speak. We will revisit what we learned by visiting a series of neighborhoods with potential project sites. We will visit some of the low structures there, while also thinking about the strategies we will use to develop design work in these areas. We will propose ways to preserve and utilize existing low buildings that are key aspects of neighborhoods and ways to instill lowness into areas through new interventions. This work will be informed by our own individual and collective viewpoints. Again, lowness can be utilized for different purposes – as a tool of increasing access and accessible space, as a way of building cheaply, easily and less dangerously, as a potential way to create specific social interactions or environmental impacts, as a way of designing outside robust formalist aesthetics, among other possibilities. We will explore the different potential sites together and determine whether to work individually or in groups and based on the tempo of the studio. Additionally, and significantly, we will arrive at decisions about program relative to the sites and neighborhood needs – for housing, community space, religious buildings, workplaces, etc. Three sites will be selected as possibilities within New York City, but others are possible and based on student interests. Typically areas of NY zoned M1-D contain these types of buildings as well as some R3 districts.
Schedule (Proposed, UNDER DEVELOPMENT)
| WeeK 1 | 8/29 | UNIT 1 | Introduction – with lecture, discussion |
| 9/1 | Introduction | ||
| WeeK 2 | 9/5 | LABOR DAY | Rest |
| 9/8 | UNIT 2 | Introduction and Assignment of Tall NY Buildings – Research | |
| WeeK 3 | 9/12 | Interpretation of precedent building | |
| 9/15 | Model printing | ||
| Week 4 | 9/19 | Bringing the building down to size | |
| 9/22 | Printing/place-down | ||
| Week 5 | 9/26 | DAVID OOT (Rosh Hashana) | |
| 9/29 | Final Review Project 2 | ||
| Week 6 | 10/3 | UNIT 3 | Introduction |
| 10/6 | Site Visits | ||
| Week 7 | 10/10 | Site Modeling | |
| 10/13 | Site Modeling | ||
| Week 8 | 10/17 | Preliminary Strategies | |
| 10/20 | Preliminary Strategies | ||
| Week 9 | 10/24 | Design Development | |
| 10/27 | Pin-up/Place-down | ||
| Week 10 | 10/31 | Design Development | |
| 11/3 | Mid-review of Project 3 | ||
| Week 11 | 11/7 | Mid-term Review Sessions | |
| 11/10 | DG OOT | ||
| Week 12 | 11/14 | Design Development | |
| 11/17 | Design Development | ||
| Week 13 | 11/21 | Design Development | |
| 11/24 | THANKSGIVING | ||
| Week 14 | 11/28 | Design Development | |
| 12/1 | Pin-up/Place-down | ||
| Week 15 | 12/5 | Design Development | |
| 12/8 | DG HALF-DAY | Final Review Prep | |
| Week 16 | 12/12 | Final Review Prep | |
| 12/15 | Final Review |
Potential Sites (Note that these may have additional sites; and there will be some latitude in picking specific sites within these general neighborhood areas.)
Site 1 – Ridgewood Border
Site 2 – Sunset Park Border
Site 3 – South-west Redhook
Studio Bibliography (all will be linked to online resources)
UNIT 1
Modernist and contemporary proposals for one-story and “low” urban plans
Tony Garnier [1919], Une Cité Industrielle: Etudes pour la Construction des Villes. Translated by Kriti Siderakis, New York, Princeton Architectural Press, 1989.
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, “Three Patio Houses,” 1929.
Ludwig Hilberseimer, “L-shaped Houses in Settlement Units,” 1935.
Adalberto Libera, Tuscolano Housing, Rome, 1950
Frank Lloyd Wright, “Plan of Usonia: with one-story homes,” 1951.
ATBAT Afrique, Carrières Centrales Housing Project, Casablanca, 1951
Jorn Utzon, Kingo Houses, Denmark, 1953-58
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, “ Pavilion Townhouses,” 1961.
Le Corbusier, Venice Hospital Proposal, Venice, Italy, 1964
Candalis, Josic, Woods, Free University, Berlin, 1963-73
Archizoom, No-Stop City Proposals, 1972
OMA, Berlin Proposal for IBA, 1978.
Abalos and Herreros, Mora House Proposals, 2000.
MVRDV, Patio Island, 2000.
Anne Holtrop, House of Glass with Solid Walls, 2006.
KGDVS, Hospital Island, Belgium, 2012
Junya Ishigama, Housing for Elderly Residents, 2012.
One Story Buildings as Historic Urban Fabric
“The Complete Map of Qianlong Capital”, 1750
Giovanni Battista Piranesi, “Ichnographia” in Campo Marzio dell’antica Roma. 1762
Albert Ballu, Survey of the Ruins of Timgad, 1902.
Gaston Boissier, Rome and Pompeii: Archaeological Rambles, 1905.
Samuel Platner, “Topographic map of the Ruins of Ancient Rome,” 1911.
Guy P. R. Métraux, “Ancient Housing: “Oikos” and “Domus” in Greece and Rome,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians (58). 3(September, 1999), pp. 392-405.
Tarikhu Farrar, “Architecture in Africa, With Special Reference to Indigenous Akan Building Construction” in Encyclopaedia of the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine in Non-Western Cultures, ed. Helaine Selin (Berlin: Springer, 2008), 199-202.
Linda Manzanilla, “Teotihuacan: Apartment Compounds, Neighborhood Centers, and Palace Structures,” in Mathew Robb, ed. Teotihuacan: City of Water, City of Fire. San Francisco, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, 2018.
UNIT 2
Essays on Relevant Methodologies
Greg Lynn, “Stranded Sears Tower,” Assemblage, 1992.
Yves-Alain Bois and Rosalind Krauss, “Horizontality,” in Formless: A User’s Guide. New York, Zone Books, 1996, 93-102.
Rem Koolhaas, “Congestion without Matter,” S,M,L,XL, New York, Monacelli Press, 1995.
Ashley Bingham, Erik Hermann, and John McMorough, “Crushing Architecture,” 2007
Eva Diaz, “Soft Architecture,” Harvard Design Magazine, 2015
Pier Vittorio Aureli and Martino Tattara, Platforms and the Use of the Ground, 2019
David Gissen, “Disabling Form,” e-flux, 2022
UNIT 3
Relevant Sources on Neighborhood Sites – NOTE THAT THIS WILL BE SIGNIFICANTLY EXPANDED
Zoning map by NYC municipality; https://zola.planning.nyc.gov/about/#9.72/40.7125/-73.733
Adam Freidberg, “Single Story Project,” Center for Architecture, https://www.centerforarchitecture.org/exhibitions/single-story-project/
Video tour of Ridgewood
On the M1-4D zoning area – https://fontanarchitecture.com/m1-4d-zoning-nyc/
Ridgewood Tenants Union, https://www.ridgewoodtenantsunion.org/
A Hot New Restaurant Moved In. That Made Its Neighbors Nervous. A gentrification battle erupts in Ridgewood, Grub Street, 2019.