NEOPOLITAN PLAN for HELL'S KITCHEN
HELL'S KITCHEN, NYC

Borfax/BLU
Richard Sommer and Laura Miller
Team: Marshall Brown, Hendra Bong, Brian Hajaar

NeoPolitan Urbanism conceives the democratic city to be — like democracy itself — as much a form through which we struggle to define a better social reality, as any built, realized, condition.

By grafting an admixture of use, height and bulk zoning onto the political and socio-economic interests that vie for power and representation within the spaces of the city, the 'NeoPolitan Plan' serves as a vehicle for private interest to become the subject of public negotiation.

Perhaps more important, the 'Neopolitan Plan' allows for 'public good' to become the object of private desire.

Project background:
Historically, this area has been known as 'Hell's Kitchen' and recently was renamed 'Clinton'. A 40-block area at the western edge of Manhattan between 34th and 42nd Streets, Hell's Kitchen contains highly diverse — and diverging — uses, populations, building stock, and transportation infrastructures. Traffic and ramps leading to and from the Lincoln Tunnel, along with connections to the Port Authority Bus terminal made the site resistant to gentrification. The recent redevelopment of Times Square, renewed interest in building over the Caemmerer Yards, and the proposal for a new Penn Station have focused interest in this area as the last area towards which midtown Manhattan's commercial districts may expand.

Despite city officials' and developers' perceptions that "no-one lives there" and that Hell's Kitchen is a fallow site waiting to be remade, the area has an active, viable residential and business population and an urban character worth understanding and expanding upon.

The existing zoning within the site is mixed and reflects revisions made to accommodate the Jacob Javetts Convention Center in the early 1980s. Much of the allowable height and bulk build-out has not been achieved. This project focuses upon development of new zoning for the site based upon the transformation of existing patterns and transferred air rights.

Position:
We join with a long-time resident of Hell's Kitchen, who, in a recent meeting, spoke out against "neighborhood chauvinism". Hell's Kitchen is defined by a complex group of social players who reside, work, own property, shop, embark, disembark, park, pass through, or otherwise inhabit its environs. While these individuals may identify with, and partake of, the bounties that Hell's Kitchen has to offer, these same persons, groups,and institutions simultaneously identify with, and participate within, numerous sites and spaces within greater Manhattan and beyond.

Because such dispersal is a basic fact of modern urban life, any plan or design framework for Hell's Kitchen must not merely explore relations within the forty Manhattan blocks that constitute its physical body, or consider solely the needs and desires generated by its various constituents, as important as these local conditions will be in determining the future of the neighborhood. 

A larger set of spaces, forces, and desires projected upon, and into the Hell's Kitchen area must also be considered. We have generated maps that figure these overlapping interests and desires, by conflating the local with proximate and remote conditions that contend for roles in reshaping Hell's Kitchen. 

Seen together, these infrastructural, domestic, commercial and recreational maps and designs constitute a virtual site through which possible futures for Hell's Kitchen may be negotiated.

ALTERNATING GROUNDS: REFIGURING MISSION BAY
New Master Plan for Mission Bay, San Franciscos 

Project Team: Leticia Lau, Byron Meritt, Ted Ngai, Kai Reidresser, Lalo Zylberberg

Project sponsored by 2AES Center for Critical Architecture, to stimulate public discussion and debate regarding the development of large site south of downtown San Francisco. To include: UCSF Biomedical Research Campus; retail, housing, office, cultural amenities, public open spaces.

SEEING SAN FRANCISCO:
The particular experience of being within the city of San Francisco is underpinned by the collision of large-scale phenomena: the conflation of a natural structure [topography] and a rational structure [grid]. Together, they create some of the citys most defining, characteristic moments; when found alongside another condition — the citys proximity to water — the specificity of the city of San Francisco surfaces and is most keenly felt.

DEFINING MISSION BAY:
Physical, perceptual, and historic aspects of Mission Bay are characterized by the following conditions:

	CONSTRUCTED GROUND: Mission Bay has been manufactured by the incremental construction of its own ground: through the deliberate conversion of marshland into solid land, and via the more casual, accumulative dumping of refuse and debris that eventually displaced water with material.
	URBAN VACANCY: In contrast to the densely-occupied, constructed texture of the city, Mission Bay is an area of vast, yawning emptiness.
	EXTENSIVE SURFACE: The flatness of the site combined with the scale of its vacancy foregrounds the surface quality of the ground in a manner not achieved in other parts of the city, where topography and buildings disrupt this phenomenon. Continuity of the ground allows the distant horizon to be visible.
	ZONE OF MOVEMENT: A field upon which large-scale forces of movement can be seen and registered, the site has been, and continues to be, shaped by movement. Regional hydrology, forming and reshaping surface, transformed the tightly-constrained contours of the surrounding land into an alluvial plane. Incised upon the ground, the sweeping tethers of the railroad tracks exist today primarily as mere traces of the intense movement that formerly occupied the site. At the site's perimeter fringe, vehicular movement on the elevated freeway simultaneously contains and reinforces the vacancy left below.
	REMNANT: Mission Bay stands out as a monumental void within the city. Such vacancy may be seen, inversely, as a figure: a remnant of previous occupations, actions, and uses that has maintained its form as the city grew about it. This vacancy records how Mission Bay has been seen/unseen, used/not used, constructed/not constructed, over the course of the citys development. More than any material effects upon the site, the overall figure that defines Mission Bay within the city stands as a kind of urban artifact attesting to its history and use.

REFIGURING MISSION BAY:
In spite of its large-scale implementation and pervasive appearance throughout San Francisco, the grid is not an EXTENSIVE element within the city. An examination of how the grid — seeking an idealized, whole, repetitive form — actually exists reveals that the cohesive fabric it seemingly seeks has in fact been rent and torn into bits. In San Francisco the grid does not form an extended field, but rather, is bounded and figural in its manifestation. Inscription (closure) is privileged, with fragmented ground found between such figures. These interstitial fissures are an opportunity for the surfacing — that is, the appearance — of another urban structure, essentially disjunctive in character in that it too may be read as a figure within the city's structure.

Rather than obscure conditions that are particular to this place within the city, this project projects new structures that emerge from the site.

AN EXTENSIVE FIELD:
Large open areas at the water's edge — Golden Gate Park, the Presidio, and the Embarcadero — provide relief from the densely occupied urban areas of the city. Mission Bay exists as the last large, undeveloped area within San Francisco, poised at the water's edge and within close proximity to downtown. There is an opportunity to create an open space — as the scale of the site portends — for the entire city. Mission Bay's development should not override or nullify the openness that currently exists there. Yet it is improbable that the area will be made into a picturesque ramble at the scale of Golden Pate Park, devoid of other uses; nor is such a possibility desirable.

A POROUS STRUCTURE:
This project proposes that the area's 'openness' be maintained while allowing the site to be built upon and occupied. A repetitive pattern of alternating bands of enclosed and open areas is imposed upon the site, creating a porous structure. Waterfront access is established via a series of landscaped strips that extend throughout the site, leading to larger parks and open areas at its perimeter boundaries.

A CONSTRUCTED GROUND:
As in an agricultural landscape, wherein the ground is expressly constructed and the relation of building to landscape is tightly integrated, the project weaves building and landscape within a newly-constructed ground. The current ground of the site was constructed to allow for the expansion of its occupation and use. It is proposed that a new topography be constructed within the site for the next layer of use.

Like forces of water moving through the site, extensive views that are currently part of the perceptual constructs of the vacant site and its surrounding conditions are identified. A series of  cuts and openings that connect the site back to other removed or remote parts of the city — Portero Hill, downtown, the waterfront, the Bay Bridge, all visually present from the site — locate areas that have the greatest visual resonance or perceptual overlap with other parts of the city.

These perceptual events, projected against the surface of the site and made visible, construct a veil of appearance that translates selected aspects of the visual structure of the Mission Bay site, literally, into the topographic. This topography is indexed to areas where densification will be more likely, due to their proximity to commercial arteries or access to already-developed areas in the city.

Modified by forces describing the dynamics of use, perception, and interaction, the raised topography forms an undulating envelope which delimits building surfaces. The ground plane is raised and inclined in certain areas to provide for continuity of movement where an overlap of service and publicly-accessible areas occurs. Undulating landforms are used to focus views and direct movement through the site. Select open areas having southern exposure are developed as thematic gardens that will further characterize specific locations within the site.

SHUFFLING ZONING + ESTABLISHING LOCALIZED HIERARCHIES:
The categories of function that zoning prescribes are displaced in favor of a consideration of USE. The too-large category that includes all but describes none is overcome by achieving a finer 'fit' between smaller parts, creating a mixed structure of no overarching hierarchies. Variation occurs locally and centrality is left aside in favor of approximate and somewhat ambiguous centers indexed to local identities. Relational affiliations of adjacency and proximity allow for an entity such as a laboratory building to partake of several spatial realms, from its different aspects: large or intimate in scale; extensive or contained vistas. The site is overlaid by several scales of open spaces; the largest correspond to perimeter conditions of the site that abut features which are part of the larger city structure — freeway, China Basin, waterfront.

The waterfront includes an array of publicly-accessible programs such as a maze-like hydroponic garden, extending into the water on a series of slender piers; an open theatre/concert area located upon an existing pier facing downtown; a proposed ferry terminal and commercial strip at the reconstructed 16th Street pier; and open areas to stage ephemeral activities. Parking for the new downtown stadium is located at the NE corner of the site, with an elevated park atop a parking structure. It has a rampart walk, and provides public access to viewing points to the city and water beyond.

OAKWOOD BIBLE CHURCH
Meeting Hall, Education Wing and Ministry Offices
Ames, Iowa

Michael Underhill, David Heyman, Laura Miller

The site is a six-acre corner of a large corn field at the southern edge of the city, where new subdivisions exist alongside family farms. The gently rolling land is slightly elevated with views to the south. Property was donated by a member of the congregation; many of whom are farmers. Because of the proposed building's rural site, Midwestern rural vernacular buildings and their situational strategies were studied.

Organized upon the principles of a Midwestern farm, a windbreak at the northwestern corner is established to anchor the complex within the larger landscape. This serves to screen the building and parking from northerly winds in winter. An clearing is cut from the surrounding cornfields; the extent of the vertical enclosure of the open space marks the time of year and the transformation of the landscape during the growing season. This area, with its southerly exposure, acts as a courtyard for the building complex; future additions to the L-shaped building will eventually enclose the courtyard space.

The building's construction system is a combination of conventional steel framing and proprietary metal building system components, with masonry at select locations. The framing system utilizes wide-flange rigid frames and purlins, with cold-rolled standing seam roofs, and rigid steel panel siding on the exterior walls. Siding and roofing are factory-finished; sunscreen and canopy louvers are wood and will be allowed to weather.

The off-the-shelf framing system is gently warped at the southern column line by three feet, allowing the roof surface to transform over the length of the building. The ceiling in the meeting hall will be 25' high at the NW corner, opening up in the transverse section to allow light to penetrate into the meeting hall from the southern courtyard exposure.

UNITARIAN FELLOWSHIP ADDITION
New Meeting Hall and Entry, Kitchen, Bathrooms, Storage
Ames, Iowa

Michael Underhill, David Heyman, Laura Miller

Located near a small land-grant university in a small town surrounded by farming communities, the addition restructures a much-loved but functionally-challenged building near campus. 

The new addition alludes to the forms of industrial agrarian structures that are present in the surrounding landscape, such as grain storage bins and elevators, and relates to the curvilinear forms of the existing structure. Building materials are galvanized corrugated steel siding, concrete, sheet metal, translucent and clear glass, with a wood frame and steel structure.

The form of the Hall reflects the confluence of various geometries described in the different uses of the meeting space by the Fellowship. Lectures, social gatherings, dances, music and vocal recitals, and large and small discussion groups are situated within a space that denies a singular focus or hierarchy. Instead, its boundaries are perceived to be amorphous, and its centers are multiple, creating a shifting, atmospheric formal reading of the space. With the addition of the Fellowship members, the room's spatial configuration is completed through participation and enactment within the space.

Entry to the Fellowship Hall is via a new vestibule that connects to a renovated Reception/Gallery area in the existing building (which formerly served as the Fellowship Hall). A curvilinear concrete wall with large and small openings separates the Reception/Gallery from the Fellowship Hall, and contains slotted openings for return air. Large, curved sliding wood panels close off the main entry to the Hall, allowing for greater flexibility in the room use.

LIEBSCHER HOUSE
New Residence

Borfax/BLU
Laura Miller and Richard Sommer 

A new house for a large young family, located in an established residential neighborhood. The site faces a large municipal park, with mature trees and gently rolling lawns. The property is slightly elevated, sloping towards the street, and has extensive views to the west through the park. 

The site is quite narrow and long (95' x 310'). A porch and verandah address the street front and the park vista, while the drive and main entrances are located along the more planar side elevation. Existing trees, located east of the drive, were preserved, as well as a mature pine tree at the center of the site.

The clients admired Prairie School and Neoclassical architecture; the house design mediates between the demands of a contemporary house - interconnected, flowing and open spaces - and aspects of the cubic / volumetric houses found in the Midwest - distinctly delineated rooms with defining character. 

Through the disposition of interlocking rooms that provide framed views to other spaces within the house, a layered sense of space is created; opportunities are made for light to penetrate the interior spaces that in traditional houses would be dark circulation spaces. Views between rooms and to specific exterior elements were considered carefully.

The plan is organized around a central light core and its L-shaped stair, culminating in a clerestory at the third level, bringing light through to the first floor stair hall.