601 Design Studio - MArch I Weitzman School of Design, University of Pennsylvania
Fall 2019
Critic: Ben Krone, TA: Catherine Shih
New housing development traditionally acts as an accelerant to making neighborhoods in New York unaffordable for its longer-term residents.[1] In response, this adaptive reuse and housing project, located in the GBX terminal in Red Hook, comes as an extension of the work of Pioneer Works and their Ecologies of Transition Roundtable Series, advocating for projects that intersect design, science and ecology. These three things become assets meant to strengthen the housing and the residency program of the building. In order to achieve this, I dealt with a continuous element (the ribbon) that moves throughout and in-between the silos organizing the space based on openness and enclosure, public and private, shared and intimate environments. The openings throughout the building create a visually shared space that promotes an ambiguous condition between the housing and the workshops, the interior and the exterior; meant to integrate different social groups that already coexist in Red Hook: artists, designers, activists, young entrepreneurs, nuclear families. This then provides flexible spaces for making and exhibiting projects related to water resilience and its relevancy when living on the waterfront.
The “ribbon” defines the ambiguity or determinacy of the spaces as it also makes a monument for water once it reaches the roof and the ground of the building. The goal is to intersect the housing program with the work of organizations like Marisa Prefer’s Invisible Labor and Resilient Red Hook. Potentially turning the Ecologies of Transition Roundtable discussions in physical outcomes that thrive the adoption of policies in favor of long-term urban ecological thinking and conservancy of the Gowanus Canal.
[1] Ben Krone’s 601 Housing Studio, excerpts from the studio prompt. Weitzman School of Design, University of Pennsylvania. August 2019.
