An amazing and talented group of students made something worthwhile and in a manner that I think is unique to GSAPP. Below are images from the final intervention – a mobile sound and light performance space. As a quick overview, we spent the first session reading, drawing, and talking to community groups about who gets to build things in the city and why. What systemic issues result in this urban area being neglected? The second session we worked hands-on and in close collaboration with a number of organizers and community artists including the Uni-Project, Uptown Grand Central, as well as Harlem’s young musician Carlito Ratti. I thought it was very worthwhile for the students to not only work collaboratively amongst themselves, but also to fabricate something meaningful and interesting for actual people to use and experience.

An abbreviated syllabus below, full syllabus here: https://medium.com/@john.h.locke/hacking-the-urban-experience-2018-18f267862c10:

Session A Overview
“Attack current conditions in a manner that will change them.”
– Siegfried Kracauer

“It’s easy to say we need recyclable, sustainable technologies, old and new — pottery making, bricklaying, sewing, weaving, carpentry, plumbing, solar power, farming, IT devices, whatever. But here, in the midst of our orgy of being lords of creating, texting as we drive, it’s hard to put down the smartphone and stop looking for the next technofix. Changing our minds is going to be a big change. To use the world well, to be able to stop wasting it and our time in it, we need to relearn our being in it…”
-Ursula K. Le Guinn, Deep in Admiration (2017)

This semester we will collaborate with the UNI Project (www.theuniproject.org) — a non-profit that creates learning environments in public spaces across New York City — to design, build, deploy, test and defend a 1:1 scale prototype intervention intended to facilitate interactive participation in public life.

How we build, how things are made and for whom, reflects the social, economic, and political values of a community. We have the opportunity to help shape those values in our own neighborhoods. Here, on the street, New York’s key urban questions can be explored and tested. This is where in the words of Michael Sorkin, cities are “distribution engines”, separating bodies and power in to distinct tranches, which require a constant vigilance to break down these spatial inequalities in an endless struggle to maintain free, open space that is accessible to all. We’re now living through the broken failures of neoliberal urban planning, where public benefit has been surrendered in deference to a developer’s personal gain. However, with tactical precision, we will apply ourselves to subverting the systemic decisions that have led us to this point, in an attempt to provide an alternate path forward. We can prove that things, ideas, installations can exist in public space only for delight, outside of market forces.

We will begin with Henri Lefebvre’s assertion for a shared “right to the city”, an essential reading of the urban experience against the privileged inertia of entrenched power, in which a pluralistic collection of citizens must collectively create their city. The temporary activations and assemblages that we develop can lead the way toward an urban environment that provides for the many. In this way, our work should by its own definition be critical, it should merge the social, physical, and experiential, and acknowledge the political ramifications behind architecture and planning in 2018’s America.

This course seeks to assert the relevance of the design and fabrication skills at our disposal as potentialities for increased relevance. Through the re-appropriation and re-imagining of existing urban conditions, the student will harness their entrepreneurial spirit to design and fabricate a working prototype that embraces the messy reality of New York. The student will begin by identifying a quality of the urban condition that includes the latent capability for engagement and work toward fabricating an adaptive, responsive and environmentally viable solution. Specific emphasis will be placed on testing and exploring through hands on research the possibilities of detailing and fabricating using unorthodox materials. Formulating a strong guiding thesis idea will be essential to the project’s success, but the core challenge for the student will be converting a strong idea into physical reality, something to be observed, tested and documented.

Session A Goals
By attempting to capture a broader audience for architectural interventions, a number of questions present themselves and the student will be challenged to anticipate possible eventualities — how will it be used? How can we quickly imbue meaning in our work? How do we engage with different communities? How do we collaborate with outside groups? Fabrication will be considered less from a formal quality, and more from a use, durability, improvisation and public participation viewpoint.

Ultimately the student will come out of the course with a healthy respect for two core concepts: Firstly, an increased skill in the use and applicability of the fabrication skills we have at our disposal for solving design issues using unorthodox materials in unconventional settings; and two, that there is an opportunity for architects to regain lost relevance by inserting themselves through unsolicited proposals into the public consciousness as stewards of urban well-being.

Session B Overview
What can architecture accomplish? Is it merely the competent combination of a client’s given program, site, and budget? Are we merely the credentialed executors of assignments? Or worse yet, is society at a point in which it no longer expects anything from us? Do we now have the courage to leave the safety of the assignment and transform ourselves into entrepreneurs and producers? Our goal will be to reclaim the mantle of empowerment. We will form new alliances with groups outside of the architectural aficionado, and imbue our work with dignity and worth to appeal to the non-architect, the average citizen, the neighbor.

Building off the skills and experience gained in the first half of the class, this second session will look deeper into the possibilities of public fabrications to functionally alter everyday urban encounters. What do common materials mean to people? What impact can form have on the reading of a project?

The goal will be to create a proposal for a mobile installation that can accommodate future progress and participation — a malleable first draft that allows a feedback loop with the neighborhood to give back and evolve together. We will push the notion that learning occurs through making, doing, and interactivity; while giving primary focus to the designing of experiences in lieu of objects. How can you engage with a pluralistic public to have them become a partner in your work? How does that experience become fun, easy, and understandable?

Session B Goals
The temporary final intervention should give you an opportunity to upend the distinctions between public and private. You can temporarily disregard social hierarchies, and choreograph a temporary experience that provides for alternative social encounters and shared urban encounters. New York is a palimpsest of change on top of change, but your temporary work should guide the permanent into more democratic, open, and acerbic directions.

You will learn to collaborate with outside groups, in a project for real people, re-defining notions of authorship in architectural work. You will explore new models of practice, and leave the course with an understanding of how your own form, program, and material assemblages can change urban experiences.

Many thanks to Sam and Leslie Davol at the Uni-Project for all their help and advice, as well as Carey King with Uptown Grand Central for the amazing support.

Many thanks to Sam and Leslie Davol for the project photography!

Images from the three-day event in Queens, sponsored by the great team at the Jamaica Center for Arts & Learning and with Joaquin Reyes.

The Inflato Dumpster is a radical new conception of what constitutes public space in New York City. This site-specific work creates an open, engaging street-level structure that acts as a mobile learning laboratory through creative programming events that reflects the diversity of its location. The project takes advantage of digital design and new lightweight fabrication techniques to create a framework for small group discussion and engagement.

The project includes 165 square feet of enclosed space with maximum dimensions at 17’ height by 12’-6” wide and 24’ long. The main element is an inflatable membrane containing 2000 cubic feet of volume, weighing less than 20 lbs. Made from a combination of lightweight inflatable materials and a modular city dumpster, the Inflato presents a subdued silver, semi-reflective surface from the outside, while the interior creates a gold, brightly gilded interior.

A few quick shots of the Inflato Dumpster project installed in the Jamaica Center for Arts & Learning gallery in Queens as part of the 2016 Jamaica Flux show.

The Flux 2016 exhibition invited 19 artists to study the effects of art in public spaces and provokes conversations regarding art’s role in community, participation, commerce, and urban renewal.

This was a preview exhibition of the Inflato project before its full activation (complete with pre-fab metal base) on the 165th Street Pedestrian Mall.

Presented here is a (losing) competition entry for a re-design of the ubiquitous “urban shed” – the pole and plywood constructions temporarily thrown up to protect pedestrians from falling building debris during facade renovations. They are an interesting typology, both because they are everywhere and are also built using pre-fabricated components in a completely market driven approach, every element has been pared down to cost per protective surface. Every couple of years someone tries and re-thinks these things, but due to the cost and existing, entrenched interests, these re-designs never go anywhere. The argument I was trying to push was twofold: 1) taking advantage of an existing material that already relates to street protection could offset costs, and 2) that the design would be exciting enough that building owners could reap some economical benefit through a boost in traffic flow by putting up something like this. Project text below:

A city manifests itself through its architecture, its built form represents its values and priorities. This ideas competition hosted by the New York Building Foundation is an amazing opportunity to explore how the city and building owners will proceed to treat what is in many ways the most modest and ubiquitous of architectural elements, but one that we all encounter each and every day – the construction shed.

The questions before us are simple, will the form of the shed continue to be dictated by that which presents the perceived lowest cost per sf? This is a notion dictated more by complacency and inertia as opposed to New York ingenuity and data-driven metrics. Or, will the shed evolve into a form as slick and scaleless as the latest glass and steel construction, furthering the ever expanding gulf between New Yorkers and relegating architecture and engineering to the realm of a luxury item. Or, will it pursue a sustainable, iconic, human-scaled solution, which can adapt to changing needs in neighborhoods as diverse as ours?

The proposal included here envisions a future construction shed built from reclaimed NYPD wooden sawhorses. These sawhorses were retired in 2007, but they are still available for donation and hold a prominent place in the collective consciousness of the city. Their familiarity with New Yorkers imbues them with an ingrained acceptance to their position as part of the urban streetscape – like seeing an old friend again, but their novel use here, elevates the basic construction assembly into an uplifting form that makes the shed into something more than pure tectonics.

They also present us with an opportunity to acquire a readily available, highly-durable material for a low-cost. In a practical sense, the sawhorses in their previous life as crowd control devices had to withstand a number of structural requirements. Here, the existing sawhorse connection techniques – slotting, nailing and screwing – are used again, this time to withstand a vertical load through multiple connecting load paths and redundant connections that will meet and exceed Section 3307 of the New York City Building Code. Wood also allows for ease of assembly through cutting of pieces and through the use of inexpensive attachments and fasteners as required.

Lastly, this design represents the transformations inherent in the evolving city over the last 50 years. The NYPD wooden sawhorse material here is no longer one that restricts movement and creates artificial barriers in urban space, but rather it is put to a new purpose, one that enables free and open movement while providing shelter and protection for all.

The Inflato Dumpster was back as part of the 6th Annual Bloomingdale Family Days located in my neighborhood, steps from my apartment in fact. Many thanks to the Columbus-Amsterdam BID and Budget Dumpster for the generous support. It was a great turnout and a really successful event.

Please see this link for more about this ongoing project.

Inspired by Ai Wei Wei and aided by modern journalism’s canny ability to simultaneously photograph the same object from multiple vantage points, I wanted to find a way for everyone to identify and express displeasure at the “98% of everything that’s built and designed today [that] is pure shit.”

This is the fourth in a series of 3D Printed experiments in using reality capture software to generate 3d printable models. Each experiment is printable within 2 hours.

The Creation

A convenient carrying method to start identifying the 98% of…

…shitty plutocrat housing…

…shitty click bait articles…

…shitty generic glass buildings in historic neighborhoods…

…shitty innocuous luxury condos…

…shitty condos on Cathedral property…

…oh wait, nevermind, actually I guess this one is ok…

EDIT:
.STL MODEL LINK:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/q5m4cj0hzce2ozu/GEHRY-FINGER.stl?dl=0

A small selection of the amazing work the group produced in class this semester. Click on the images above for more information.

Quick Description:
This is an inflatable classroom installed inside of a dumpster. It is the first installation – the beta version – launched over three days in late-September at 109th Street and Amsterdam Avenue in the Bloomingdale Neighborhood of Manhattan. The project includes 165 square feet of enclosed space with maximum dimensions at 17’ height by 12’-6” wide and 24’ long. Over the three days the project was activated, over 500 people in the neighborhood interacted with the installation through a number of events and workshops including: a musical performance by Amani Fela, documentary screening by filmmaker Simone Varano and a 3D printing and modeling work session. The total project budget was $4,200 (including equipment rental) – the majority of said budget was funded via Kickstarter, a process we are deeply skeptical of in regards to urban projects, but used nonetheless. The intention is for the project to continue to periodically activate and further explore how it fits within this neighborhood. This project was created with friend and design partner Joaquin Reyes, and is part of a Columbia University course I teach titled “Hacking the Urban Experience.”

Inflato:
The main element is an inflatable membrane containing 2000 cubic feet of volume. This inflato is made from a combination of two lightweight materials. The first is a clear polyethylene. This is an inexpensive, common and biodegradable plastic material that will allow views both from and out to the street. The second material is a mylar film used in both emergency hiking blankets and spacecraft. Dual-sided – silver and gold – the inflato presents a subdued silver, semi-reflective surface on the exterior with a gold, brightly gilded interior. The street side is more opaque, while the sidewalk side is more open allowing views and a surface to project images onto. The transparent side also allows light to filter down through the canopy of the sidewalk maple tree from above. There is a strong evocation of being under a shaded tree.

Dumpster:
“Go inside a dumpster?!?!” – An understandable response given by roughly a quarter of people when told they were welcome to go inside. I think the dumpster helped because it kept the project in the realm of the recognizable, and fed into the transgressive feeling of being inside of an off-limits space. Connotations of trash aside, there’s a shared awareness of the spatial interior dimensions of a dumpster, unlike, say, “an inflatable classroom” or, even worse, “a new paradigm of public space,” which could be just about anything. Or maybe it just lowered the bar so much, that when people stepped not into a rusted metal box, but rather a glowing vaulted space, they couldn’t help but feel like they had been transported.

So there’s certainly an interest in transforming existing banal street structures, but also being drawn to the idea of turning something typically associated with waste and discarded materials into a space for something exciting and new. This, in turn, led to exploring the invisible lightness of the inflatable in relation to the hard steel of the dumpster and the heavy demolition work of machines and tools. This juxtaposition of heavy/light and new/used became a key hot-air-balloon-like diagram of the solid base paired with the weightless membrane.

Maybe there’s also a metaphor here about “recycling” knowledge. The goal of this thing being a new type of classroom space meant that knowledge was not just passed down to a captive audience, but that what’s taught is something that could resonate out like ripples and eddies in a stream – emanating from the central mixing chamber of the dumpster. Repeatedly cycling back and forth amongst everyone that came through. For example, we avoided anything overtly didactic – an early idea of streaming neighborhood demographic data was rejected on the grounds of being too overt – instead favoring a more subtle approach such as that taken with the films screened by Simone Varano. Not only are the films challenging documentaries that deal with authenticity, music and living in the city, but anyone that sat in a dumpster and watched them took away the notion that a theater is not only the AMC on 84th street, but that this can be a valid means of projection and expression. Seeing a construction dumpster on the street in New York invariably indicates change, whether a new condo going up or a renovation going in. Either way, the endpoint is often exclusionary in nature. In this project, the dumpster still indicates a temporal event, however, we hope that it triggers a ripple of aftereffects that will germinate practical ideas and actions that are more inclusionary and empowering for the neighborhood. This is something that has to be iterated on and pushed further in future installations.

There were also pragmatic reasons for using the dumpster. It gave us a solid structure to anchor the inflatable, to resist any uplifting wind loads barreling down the avenue or traveling up 109th from Columbus, which is at a significantly lower elevation. Parking Day by Rebar is a big influence, but is limited by short time allotments provided by the meter and single parking space limitations. The dumpster allows us to take over a few parking spaces at approximately 160 square feet of New York real estate (bigger than my bedroom) for a fairly significant chunk of time. Which of course leads to questions of….

Permitting:
With the DOT’s generous help, we were able to successfully navigate some of the overlapping permitting requirements and submit a Street Activity Permit to the City. These typically take two weeks to receive for small events that do not require any street closures. The application fee is $25. However, hauling companies of course do not pull Street Activity permits before dropping dumpsters on the streets. The obvious difference being people aren’t expected to be hanging out in them, just throwing their trash in them. There’s some gray area here that we think is interesting and can be explored further.

Installation:
It was all very friendly and inclusionary. By the third day when I was walking down the street, carrying a large jumbled pile of plastic and mylar to the dumpster, random people would be calling out to me asking when and what was going on inside that day. I’d be remiss not to point out how great it was interacting with people. We were thrown into the neighborhood and had to have a concise explanation for what we were doing. Any pretentiousness or BS descriptions wouldn’t cut it. But that was what was most exciting: Seeing what happens when actual other human beings interact with the thing – kids, moms on the way from the store, students, the elderly, drunks, lifelong and newly-arrived residents, football fans (on Sunday outside the bar), and so on – all with opinions and critiques, but all interested in what was going on. Urban street life in the area moves fast and seems complicated but it’s actually pretty easy to jump into the thick of it.

As an introduction to the neighborhood, afropunk group Amani Fela opened with a music set on the first night, and seemed totally unfazed to be playing inside of a gold dumpster. The percussion had people lining up to check it out. Unfortunately, one thing that was not anticipated – but in hindsight now seem obvious – was that most people assumed that this was one of the following: a private event, an event requiring admission or some type of corporate event. (There were also a few inquiries as to whether this had anything to do with ConEd testing a mobile containment unit, however that one was not as widespread). Peoples’ initial reactions were an unfortunate acknowledgement that, as a society, most of us assume that if something is going on in the street, they must have to pay up somehow to check it out. Overcoming that ingrained skepticism and convincing people this was free became a constant struggle. A large signboard with “FREE TO ALL” was brought out and prominently displayed. By the third day, word had spread and people had heard about the Inflato via friends and neighbors. Without being prompted they would walk right in. It’s a start.

Credits:
Department of Urban Betterment: John Locke and Joaquin Reyes

Inflatable Fabrication: TW2M Fabrication

Dumpster Supplier: Budget Dumpster

Street Activity Permit Support: NYC Department of Transportation and the City of New York

Photography: Jackie Caradonio

Special Thanks to: Columbus Amsterdam BID, Simone Varano, Amani Fela, Delia Reyes, Mugi Pottery, Ultimaker.

There were 240 individual triangles, which required more than 300 hours to assemble.

73% of project cost was from crowdsourced funding. The remaining 27% was self-initiated by the Department of Urban Betterment.

While it may have literally had “affordable” written all over it, we exceeded our initial budget.

Local filmmaker Simone Varano sets up for a screening of her documentary series dealing with music, culture and neighborhood issues.

Workshop attendees learn about modelling and building models using a consumer grade 3D printer.

Amani Fela, unfazed by the surroundings.

Taken from the second night, capturing a diverse mix of neighbors and passersby that were interacting with the installation. People’s responses ran the gamut, but regardless of how skeptical they were of this thing, their curiosity would get the best of them. Once someone peeked in through the porthole, everyone wanted to go inside and check it out. Located at 109th and Amsterdam Ave.

Difficult not to anthropomorphize this thing coming into being, but maybe that’s one of the things that’s cool in working with a dynamic structure – the weightless way it subtly sways in the breeze or will ripple in the backdraft of a speeding car or contracts and expands when someone enters much like a giant lung. People always liked to put their hands on the silvery metallic membrane and push in, feeling the negative pressure resistance from inside. This is in contrast to the hard steel of the dumpster in that the silver of the inflato gently reacts and responds to touch.