Every time you change the DNA that defines a city and makes it unique, you change the living, breathing creature itself. Cities are spaces that have been built up of layers over time. These layers allow tradition, dynamic relationships, and personal identities to thrive within them. Through urban planning since the early twentieth century, demolitions, new building projects and revitalizations have been affecting changes on cities with little or no regard to these characteristics that make the city what it is (see Actor Matrix), causing major problems for the inhabitants and bringing down the success of the city overall.
Future changes that are made to urban spaces need to take many factors into consideration to be successful. They must be designed as small initiatives as opposed to large-scale plans. They also need to take the unique urban fabric of the city into consideration while accounting for change, time, and flexibility in order for the city to remain vibrant. This can be approached using the idea of recombinant design, a style that uses characteristics from opposing aspects of a specific site and combines them to introduce a new idea into the space.
By taking the uniqueness of every urban space into consideration and remembering the mistakes already made in historical urban planning initiatives, small urban interventions can be designed to better an urban space while respecting the creature that is the city.
Program Statement
The function of the space is to take co-existing but opposing programs in an unsuccessful system and combine them in a way that produces a thriving atmosphere. When combining these separate programs, the “place,” or identity, of each needs to be recognized and reincorporated or the new space will suffer from “placelessness.”
These programs need to be combined carefully. They must retain some portion of their own separate spaces while sharing circulation. This will allow the spaces to provide for their own needs but forces them to interact at some point. The circulation space acts as a catalyst for this interaction. The space also needs to have a new type of space that is a hybrid of the two existing programs. The sharing of some type of program and of circulation doesn’t allow for the disassociation that the programs experienced in the past.
Adjacency needs to be revaluated so that it doesn’t allow for disassociation. These programs are currently “adjacent” to each other but share no commonalities besides location. Adjacent programs must be combined to cause some interaction.
Placelessness: when places become more and more similar because of urban planning guidelines and lose a distinctive sense of place, lack of identity
Site Criteria
The site should be in an urban location that currently has successful and unsuccessful aspects to it. It should be located within a central area of its immediate neighborhood or in the transition space between several neighborhoods. The space should be a relatively small area surrounded by various types of functioning programs. It should have individual, site-specific character. It should be missing an aspect that would link the existing qualities of the site together. It should be an area that is currently under utilized, a tear in the thriving urban fabric. The site must be a space that would affect the immediate neighborhood and the greater urban area if changes were made to it.
Site Statement
I chose 429 Harrison Avenue in the South End of Boston, Massachusetts as my site. It is the site of the brick shell of a factory building from the 1800s and a parking lot. It is located in a neighborhood that has many diverse characteristics, economically and culturally. It is a vastly under used space that has potential because of its central location. It is surrounded by many varying types of program, including high-end condos, public housing, a public school, small commercial units, restaurants, a bus storage warehouse, a recreational sports field, and more parking lots.
I chose 72 East Canton Street in the South End of Boston, Massachusetts as my site. It is currently the site of a private parking lot and lacks any unique characteristics. It is located in a programmatically diverse neighborhood. It is an under utilized space that could potentially revitalize the neighborhood because of its central location between many types of program. It is surrounded by public housing, a public school, small residential units, small commercial units, industrial warehouses, a police station, and more parking lots.
Analysis / Re-presentation Ideas
I need to start by analyzing to functions and protagonists of the space. I need to understand what programs comprise the surrounding area, who is using these programs, and who is affected by this use. I also need to analyze moment through and around the specific site. I also need to identify the specific characteristics that make this site unique and give it a sense of “place” within the community.
In selecting the site you need to clarify what you want your project to do in the neighborhood. Even though the 3 sites are relatively close to one another the surrounding community they each serve is actually very different. As we have discussed the South End has historically been an area of the city that has been developed then fallen into disrepair and then again becomes the place to live. This cycle has happen for the last 100+years. When I moved here in 1991 the South End was very different than it is now. The last 20 years have transformed it to the high end restaurants and newly constructed loft spaces. I worked right next to the Harrison site for 7 years and slowly experienced the transformation of the area. The Harrison site is surrounded by all the elements that many of the South End Identify with now (galleries, restaurants). The other sites are more on the periphery of the south end. So in the selection of the site what do you want your program elements to contribute to the development and the DNA of the city. It might help to do a historical map analysis to see how the south end changed over time so you can see the DNA of the site. Using the metaphor of DNA --as we evolve we do not lose full sections of our past DNA they are modified and the remnants are still there. These series of analysis maps will help you discover what existed before to see how to add to it. For example what was at the site of the Cathedral Housing project? As you can imagine -the South End would not have such a large public housing project built now. THe South End is very interesting because of all the type of communities that live together but I'm not sure how much they overlap.
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