essential urbanism

(Un)Fortunately the final week before the final thesis presentations has arrived.  The project has settled relatively well with only a few things left to design and resolve at the urban scale.  The masterplan of “Food City” is mostly complete, and I have nearly completed designing the moments of juxtaposition and interaction between the commuter-scape and the food distribution center (logistical-scape) below.  Here a few process images as I being production for my final presentation today.  Click on the images to enlarge.

Scheme 1 Model

Scheme 2  Model

View at Food City entry.

Test rendering taken at the basketball court portion of the commuter-scape.

Alright so outside of my thesis, which is about moving the Hunt’s Point Produce Market to New Jersey, for rhetorical/cultural effect, Hunts Point might actually move to New Jersey for economic survival.  As this recent news video espouses, if the market moves to New Jersey, the effect on local businesses and the couple of thousand of Bronx residents who work at the market could be devastating. At the same time as this video leaves out, the market has serious limits for the health of all of New York City at its current location and the pollution from its truck traffic is incredibly detrimental to south Bronx residents, who have the highest asthma rates in the city.

Im sure my thesis proposal/site are probably not top priorities in the move to New Jersey, but it will be interesting to see how New York City and the market respond.

http://abclocal.go.com/wabc/story?section=news/local/new_york&id=8046081

LOGISTICAL URBANISM:Produce City Market
Logistics, comprising the planning and spatialization of material flows, is inherently embedded in the everyday performance and maintaince of urban life.

Starting in the mid-1900’s, as cities began to decentralize, logistical infrastructures (such as private big box distribution centers) began materializing in increasingly non-urban  areas, in pursuit of cheap and expansive land. This trend spatially and cognitively alienates citizens from the systems of their sustenance, leaving the city teatering on the edge of crisis, with only a days worth of food within its limits.

With a requisite of urban proximity, perishable commodities such as fruit and vegetable produce have the potential to challenge this trend.  As such, sites of produce logistics offer a testing ground for exploring possible “reapproachments” between logistical facilities, infrastructures, and the urban lifestyles they support.

This project seeks to relocate the New York’s City Hunt’s Point Produce Market to the “shadow of Manhattan”: Secaucus, New Jersey.  At a multi-infrastructural site where the movement of vaste amounts of freight and people coexist as they move in and out of New York City, this project seeks to visually and programmatically integrate a commuter-scape with a facility of logistical transference.

Continuing with further analysis of the Hunts Point Produce Market in South Bronx, the structure is made up horizontally expansive units that are owned by a single Food Distributer (Hunts Point has 48), and comprise a linear democratic single dock system.

In visting one of these single food distributor’s unit, I noticed that no matter the length of the unit the facility typically only had one or two active entry doors to control security.  What if, using high-bay construction, these cold storage units became vertical?  Given that Distribution Center’s largest expense is for land, a vertical high bay typology could help minimize the buildings foot print and thus its cost.

Through verticalizing each food distributors cold storage units, the length of the dock is maintained to allow enough room for the current capacity truck docking load, however large gaps form between each cold storage tower.  Each gap is related to the height of its adjacent towers (who height was determined by the current cold storage volume of each distributor at Hunts Point.  How could these gaps be programmed beyond food logistics?  What types of urbanism do the gaps formally, and the site practically, allow.  Could the new space created by verticalizing the cold storage program financially support the market?

Completed site model showing commuter vehicles as red and freight as orange.

View of the initial proposal from the New Jersey Turnpike Bridge.

While the form is responsive to the logistical protocols established throughout my thesis prep, its is limiting in its ability to successfully host public program. At over 3000 feet long the long straight bar, though efficient creates a brutal linear space.  The surface of the enclosed docks which creates a plinth through which the towers rise, is intended to be a “commuter-scape”.  The notion of a commuter-scape is that since almost 350,000 people pass this site a day and have access to it through Secaucus Station and Interstate 95 exit 15X, couldn’t the public life here serve to attract those heading in and out of New York daily.  How can the form  of the produce market evolve to promote an interface between the daily commute of the urban public and the daily transport of their food

0_SITE

The site is bordered by the high volume Northeast Rail Corridor Line and the New Jersey Turnpike, and Laurel Hill Park to the north.  To the east the site is bordered by New Jersey Turnpike Exit 15X another commuter rail line, and Secaucus Junction Station.  To the south and east lies the Hackensack River.

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1_TWO BAR TYPOLOGY

The produce terminal market program is placed in two bars that share a rail line as a central spine.  The bar is placed parallel to the New Jersey Turnpike and Northeast Rail Corridor to provide maximum visibility while avoiding Little Snake Hill to the south.

2_CONNECT TO STATION

The bars are extended over exit 15X and the commuter rail  to connect with the Secaucus Junction Station and New County Road.  The extensions and

3_CONNECT TO RIVER

The two bars are bent around Little Snake Hill perpendicular to the Hackensack River creating a connection between the commuter rail station and the river.  Additionally be bending the bars, the building can be viewed obliquely when approaching along the New Jersey Turnpike and the Northeastern Rail Corridor.  The bend also allows the termini of the buildings to be viewable from the any point along the building.

4_SPREAD BARS: RAIL

The bars spread apart on their southern end to permit rail access and accommodate a rail staging area for incoming freight cars.

5_SPREAD BARS_TRUCK

The bars are spread apart at their northeaster terminus to permit truck access from New County Road/Exit 15X. A 200 ft. wide tarmac follows the outside edge of the bars to allow for truck docking and staging.

Photo-montage of recreation programming as commuter-scape.

Photo-montage view of  dramatized viewing theater into automated cold storage building.

Photo-montage view of possible rail yard existing where the two legs of the bar split apart.

Secaucus Junction Station

A view west towards the site from Secaucus Junction Station.  To the left is the Northeast Corridor Rail Line (Amtrak and New Jersey Transit).  To the right are the ramps for exit 15X off of the New Jersey Turnpike.  In the distance just right of middle is Snake Hill, from which the site can be viewed.

Following the development of station a new housing complex called Xchange at Secaucus Junction coexists with Secaucus’ logistics landscape.  The residences are advertised as one stop away from NYC.

Further to the northwest the newly completed Laurel Hill Park exists on the quarried remains of Snake hill up against the Hackensack River.

A memorial in Laurel Hill to Park dedicated to the those who had been buried at Snake Hill throughout its history as an autonomous community and asylum.

Abandoned Rail line underneath the New Jersey Turnpike heading into my site.

Beginning to climb Snake Hill to view down on the site.

Remains of the power-plant that used to power the Snake Hill Community.

The payoff, a great view of the site.  In the foreground is the New Jersey Turnpike and the Northeast Corridor Rail line.  In the middle ground is the bulk of the thesis’ proposed site and Little Snake Hill.  In the background, the large blue building is the New York City regional Post Office Distribution Center, the horizon consists of Bergen Hill, the backsides of the Palisades, and behind that a unique view of Manhattan’s Midtown.

Sketch of site with potential tower scheme for the proposed relocated Hunts Point Produce Market.

Details Coming Soon

Given the scale of the Hunts Point Produce Market (the current market), choosing a site in the ‘logistical city’ was rather simple: find 100-200 acres of undeveloped land near highways and railways.  One site immediately stood out in Secaucus, a marshy brown-field site just south of Interstate 95.  The site exists between two inter-modal yards (where most of the produce coming in by train first arrives in the NYC metro area) servicing railways that extend to the American South and West (the source of most of New York City’s produce in winter).  Additionally the site is adjacent to the Secaucus Junction Transfer Station where most major New Jersey Transit commuter trains cross on their way into Manhattan.  The sites access to rail commuters as well as the heavily commuter traveled Interstate 95 allows the project to still engage directly with a(n) (sub) ‘urban’ public.

Historically, New York City’s growth was fueled by the deep water port of the Hudson and East River estuary.  From Harlem south both rivers were lined with piers and warehouses serving the freight and passenger traffic upon which the city relied.  Manhattan was wrapped in a logistical membrane in which goods passed from ships to warehouses and then would be carted into the city to be sold and consumed. While this membrane included crime, filth, and a uninhabitable waterfront, the Logistical City (membrane) and the Cultural City coexisted.  The layout of the city fabric gave New Yorker’s a sense of where their food came from and exactly how it got there. For better or worse the processes of distribution and exchange were part of urban life, logistics made visible to those they serve.

Prototypical of many cities to come, following WWII New York Cities logistical landscape was fundamentally altered.  The collective effect of several national movements including urban renewal, environmentalism, and the Federal Highway Act of 1956, joined to transform inner city industrial waterfronts into parks and highways. Following the establishment of new major port facilities in the 1940’s  to the southwest corner of the harbor in Newark Bay, New Jersey, the new port area became the focal point of a new corridor of highway and rail infrastructures, attracting former Manhattan warehouses and distribution facilities to larger, cheaper, and more logistically efficient lots.  Over the course of the following two decades a majority of Manhattan’s piers were removed, its warehouses left for New Jersey, and Manhattan lost its literal connection to its sustenance.

Divorced from its cultural counterpart, a new logistical city formed, still serving the cultural core but spatially autonomous from it.  No longer purely reliant on ships and trains, the new-found dominance of the tractor-trailer allowed distribution centers to be removed from urban centers.  Throughout the country new logistical cities (industrial parks, ports, and inter-modal facilities) left the center city for the nearest large and uninhabited semi-urban landscapes.  Backed by tax incentives and massive infrastructure projects, a logistical city stretched north from the port at Newark, through the then uninhabited ‘Meadowlands’ of the Hackensack River in New Jersey.  Once the largest single wetland in the northeast, it has been filled in, paved over, and covered in massive commodity filled warehouses.

logistics: “the process of planning, implementing, and controlling the efficient, effective flow and storage of goods, services, and related information from point of origin to point of consumption for the purpose of conforming to customer requirements”-Council of Logistics Management

Map highlighting the logistical infrastructures of New York City (those used for freight).  The ports are shown in white, the highways in orange, and the railways in red.

Almost 2 weeks have passed since I posted about thesis thresholds, and finally a single project (in all its architecturally-specific glory) is emerging.  Born out of the: 1) Site Swap/b) Logistical way of thinking, I am proposing moving New York City’s Hunt’s Point Produce Market to an alternative site that is more efficient from a logistics point-of-view; ie. a site where the market might have better access to national rail and highway infrastructures. By moving the market to a logistically optimal site, the thesis accepts the historical, economic, and practical logics of logistics and their subsequent land-use patterns, not so much as natural, but as a fundamental requisite given the current world order.  Rather than critiquing food logistics by ignoring them, the thesis fully engages logistics and attempts to challenge and re-imagine their architectures.

This sudden emphasis on logistics was spurred through studying New York City’s logistical infrastructure, and the Hunt’s Point Produce Terminal’s less than optimal relation these infrastructure.  First off, as an east coast city, nearly all of New York City’s domestic produce arrives from the south and west, forcing the produce to cross the Hudson River on its way to the South Bronx market.   Since the closest freight rail crossing is 140 miles north of New York City in Selkirk, New York, nearly all produce arriving at the current market site has to cross the George Washington Bridge via truck.  Additionally once crossing the bridge the trucks have to go on grade through the residential neighborhoods of the Hunt’s Point Peninsula.  Like the Washington Market before it, the Hunt’s Point Market seems to have outgrown its site.

Map highlighting the volumes of produce that arrive via certain logistical infrastructures on their way to the Hunts Point Market (HPM).

Given the current logistical infrastructures in which food moves through on its way to the city, where would a new market location be the most effective logistically?  How can this effectiveness be made visible to the urban public from a site that is physically removed from it?

Thesis Design Proposals:

1) Site Swap: One possible proposal is to move the Hunts Point Food Distribution Center (or simply the produce market) to an alternative site, deeming the current site unfit due to its, distance from primary infrastructure, its urban isolation, or its degrading facilities.  A site swap would take the existing program and re-imagine it in an alterative context.

a) Historical: Prompted by research into the history of New York City’s Produce markets, one option would be to return the market with its current scale and complexities (or even project beyond them) to one of its previous urban centric sites.  In this case that would most likely mean moving the market to the site of the former Washington Market, turned World Trade Center, turned Freedom Tower construction site.  By returning the market to its former center city site, the project would be challenging logistics, requiring an exploration in hyper-logistical architecture at a site whose lack of infrastructure and space is not ideal for the flows of food distribution.  The point of this site swap is to return the market to the center of the city, where it could become a symbol/monument/infrastructure at the heart of the city.  This project dabbles in the absurd, but presents a rather clear design agenda.

b) Logistical: More practical than absurd, another site-swap option could be driven by the logics of logistics as oppose to conflicting with them.  Building off the critique of the current site, a logistical site swap would suggest the market should [X] be placed adjacent to or integrated with a requisite infrastructure or [Y] multiple sites could be sought in a more distributed urban network.  Option X could suggest that the facility be placed in the context of a seaport, airport, highway interchange or intermodal rail yard, but perhaps more interestingly, this proposal might seek to integrate the market into one of these infrastructures. Given the Hunts Point Market’s reliance on truck transportation, the market could be integrated into/with a highway to propose an exaggerated linear typology of food logistics.  A site for such a proposal can be found just north of the site along the stretch of contested Robert Moses highway known as the Sheridan Expressway.  Primarily used by trucks serving Hunt’s Point, the stretch of highway, paralleling the Bronx River, and likely slated to become park, could be re-imagined as a liner infrastructure combing highway, food terminal, and agricultural/recreation park.  Option Y critiques centralized distribution systems, and attempts to learn from more both historical and contemporary distributed networks utilized by the private sector (supermarkets).  This proposals would seek out several (5) sites throughout the city, that have the logistical/public infrastructures to purpose market facilities (taking a lesson from Barcelona).  Therefore the facilities could each take a fraction of the current produce volume, seeking to only serve there more local context, while being digitally linked to the other facilities. While all 5 sites would be studied and be included in the proposal only one site would be chosen for design elaboration.

2) Collapsing the Food System: Challenging logistics tendency to efficiently isolate modes in the fresh food chain, creating highly disparate and disconnected landscapes (ie farm (rural), warehouse (sub-urban), and restaurant (urban)).  Attempting to “make a connection between provision and consumption, use and neglect, waste and conservation”, this proposal intends to add additional/adjust existing program to the Hunts Point Site.  While the market would continue to operate at a city/region wide scale, additional programs such as farms, composting, food processing, and food retail could be added to the site producing a food-park surface that undulates above/integrates with the existing logistical food infrastructures.  This project attempts to challenge the exclusiveness of logistical landscapes and suggest programmatic alternatives.  Part symbolic, part education, part community development, this project would seek to merge architectures of production, distribution, and consumption into a single site.

3) Building for Food/Human-less Architecture: One of the most remarkable things about contemporary spaces of logistics is that they serve humans better by excluding them.  Already removed from the public sphere, walled off in big-box warehouses, increasingly (primarily in the private sector, ie: Amazon, ups, Walmart, and La Huerta) logistical architecture is becoming human-less.  Designed primarily for the movement of commodities, in this case produce, this is architecture designed by truck heights, turning radii, fork lifts, robotic arms, and crate and box dimensions.  Perhaps with distopic undertones, this proposal would look, either at Hunts Point or an alternative site, to monumentalize logistics.  Designing in the context of current and future logistical innovations, how could New York City’s fresh produce system acquire an urban presence while not or very selectively including the public realm, ie logistical-food-scraper.

4) Future Scenario: Following a distopic purview, a number of future scenario projects come to mind. Most notably one such  future scenario would be of food shortage.  Predicting that food shortages and crises are more likely in the future due to climate change, rising shipping prices related to diminishing oil, water shortages, or just a trend of nationalistic gastro-autonomy, countries and cities for that matter, will have to much more aggresively pursue food supplies.  In this scenario, heavy and fixed logistical architectures, such as the Hunts Point Food Distribution Center, will not only become much more contested facilities, but they will have to become much more dynamic in their ability to secure, store, and distribute product.  Logistical infrastructures will need to mobolize and flex.  In this proposal a more informal, lighter, and moble logistical architecture would seek to be developed that can be deployed or activated at various logistical/infrastructural nodes throughout the city.  In tension between the needs for security and efficiency with needs of access, and public assurance, this project attempts to redefine the relationship between logistical architectures in a future urban context.