Soundview Site; Completed

I have officially finished the first two years of my master of architecture at the City College of New York.  Here are the final images of the latest completed project from the spring semester.  

As you may recall from the previous posts about this project, it was a collaborative studio between the architecture students and the landscape architecture students.  

The site is in Soundview in the Bronx, and includes the New York Housing Authority Soundview Houses and Soundview Park.  Together my group looked at the housing, the park, and their connection to the rest of the neighborhood.  Ultimately, my own personal focus within the group was to fully design and detail one of the proposed buidlings on the site which is documented here.  Click on the photos to enlarge them.

Soundview News

As you may already know, the site for our studio this semester is in Soundview Bronx, which includes Soundview Housing and Soundview Park.  After becoming a fan of the Soundview Park Facebook Page, I saw a link to this video.  Morgan Powell has been researching and writing about the Bronx River, and now gives tours along the river as a way to bring people back in touch with the history of the river and surrounding neighborhoods and create a greater appreciation of the rich history of the region.

Soundview Sketch: Visual Corridors

THIS IS JUST A SKETCH-ISH THING.  Its a work in progress. Click here and here to get the background details. More soon when I finish these fabulous diagrams I'm working on.

Soundview Site Plan

Wow, I think I've been buried in schoolwork.  Sorry about that.  Here's the latest site plan from our collaborative studio with the landscape architects in Soundview, Bronx.

For more information, click here.

New Semester, New Site

This semester, for the first time ever here at Spitzer School of Architecture at City College of New York, the Master of Architecture program and the Master of Landscape Architecture program are working together on a collaborative studio.

This semester the focus is on housing for us architects (I still have no idea what the Landscape Architects do...but I'm trying to learn), and our site is in Soundview Park in the Bronx.

Here are some photos from our snowy visit to the site.

This housing development was built by the New York City Housing Authority.

Communal Dining

I FINALLY made it to the halfway mark of architecture school.  Here's the final results of a semester of work on the Harlem River Urban Agrarian Center. (click on the link for all the background information)

Each of us designed a different aspect of the center. My classmate and I collaborated on a community kitchen and dining space.  She designed the kitchen as well as a culinary development center and I designed the orb shaped dining space on the water.  The roof, made of wood, is also shaped like a bowl to collect rainwater.  The space is meant to be used by the community for picnics, dining, parties, and other community activities related to the urban farm in which it is situated.

The facade is inspired by the very first people to inhabit this land - the Native American tribes of the northeast - where they would often build different structures for different seasons.  As seen in the photos above, in the winter they would be completely enclosed with a skin and the summer structures would have the skin either peeled back partially or completely removed.

The window panels of this communal dining space remain sealed shut in the winter, but in the summer they pivot open up to the summer breeze.

And here are some photos of the model:

Click here for more photos.








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Getting Ready

Cleaned out my desk for the last week before the big review.  Found all these used blades from my utility knife and thought they looked cool.

And here's some preview photos of my model of the communal dining space for the Harlem River Center For Urban Agrarian Culture....

Shadow Studies - Agrarian Center

This is an early shadow study of our building for the Harlem River Agrarian Center.  I have been collaborating with my classmate  Lori on this project.  She is designing a communal kitchen (the rhomboid shaped object), and I am designing and communal dining space (the orb shaped object).  The two buildings intersect, both physically and functionally, with a hearth located in the intersection, acting as a hinge for these 2 intersecting objects.

The relationship of the two buildings has changed a bit since this scheme.  New images coming soon!

Modeled in Rhino, Light Study done with Google Sketchup.

For previous posts on this project, click here.

Harlem River Urban Agrarian Center

Usually by this point in the semester I have posted a lot more about the progression of my project.  For some reason this semester I'm going to keep you hanging till the end, and then bombard you with all of the amazingness that the final project is.

As you already know from a previous post, about the basic program of the project, and you have already seen some of my conceptual investigations here, I now present you with some beautiful photos of the actual site, located in University Heights, The Bronx, near Fordham University, right on the Harlem River.

I love this one with the old tires submerged in the water.