On Saturday, October 8, Cinebeasts presented Gowanderlust!, an event combining a neighborhood walking tour with quick, guerilla-style film installations. Just after dusk, a group gathered at the Bell House, a bar in Gowanus, Brooklyn, where we met Nathan Kensinger, photographer, documentary filmmaker, festival programmer and our tour guide for the evening. Kensinger is best known for his work documenting off-limits spaces along the industrial waterfront of New York City. After many years living and working in Gowanus, he knows the neighborhood well and our walk was enlivened by his tales of neighborhood’s politics, environmental issues and urban legends.

Photo by Matthew Caron

Moving towards our first stop, a truck depot at 5th Street and 2nd Avenue, we took a moment to discuss the industrial history of the Gowanus Canal, its designation as a Superfund site and why, unlike many of New York’s other post-industrial waterfront areas, it has yet to be redeveloped (extreme pollution combined with the economic downturn was the group consensus). After a quick turn, we rambled across railroad ties to a vacant lot, the site of our first screening. On a screen tacked to an unsuspecting van, we viewed Silo and Camera Roll for Taylor. Silo is a single-shot time-lapse of ISSUE Project Room at its former location in a converted silo alongside the Gowanus Canal. Camera Roll for Taylor is what director Joel Schlemowitz calls a “camera roll city cine-poem.” Made as a filmic postcard to a friend, Schlemowitz refracted his frames through a crystal, shooting only sites in the vicinity of the canal.

Our second stop landed us just across from Dykes Lumber Yard on 6th Street between 2nd and 3rd Avenues. Projected just below the Dykes sign, we viewed SSS by Henry Hills. Shot in 1988, the film is composed of footage of instances of dance-like spontaneous movement in the streets of the East Village. SSS provoked conversation about ways to inhabit and appropriate under- and un-used urban space — and, it turns out, the film was the inspiration for the Gowanderlust event.

Photo by Matthew Caron

Our third stop landed us across from The Old American Can Factory, at 3rd Street and 3rd Avenue, facing a long abandoned landmarked building. Built in 1872-3, the Coignet Stone Company building was built entirely of cast concrete as a prototype to demonstrate the material’s versatility. The building sits at the edge of what was once an industrial park and is now an expansive, locally-infamous vacant lot. It has housed squatters, provided space and inspiration to artists, been termed a part of “Brooklyn’s biggest toxic playground,” and is now owned by the Whole Foods Company. Projected onto the doors of the Coignet building, we viewed Autumn Leaves, a short film by Brooklyn-based artist Donna Cameron. Cameron uses a unique method that combines photo emulsion and paper to create her work. In Autumn Leaves, she recreates the beauty of autumn by ripping, tearing and rustling the papers, simulating both the sounds and appearance of falling leaves.

A short walk across the 3rd Street Bridge brought us to our fourth stop, at the edge of the canal by the Gowanus Dredgers’ boat launch. Founded in 1999, the Gowanus Dredgers Canoe Club is dedicated to providing waterfront access and education along the canal and throughout other waterfront communities in Brooklyn. Just next to the launch site, we screened our final film, Kevin T. Allen’s What the Sea Left Behind. Depicting a “journey above and below one of America’s most polluted waterways,” Allen used a homemade hydrophone and binaural contact microphones to record the sounds of a canoe on the canal.

Photo by Matthew Caron

On our way back to Cabinet magazine’s offices for a final slideshow and some Brooklyn Brewery brew, we took a break on the Carroll Street Bridge. Built in 1888, it is the oldest retractile bridge in the United States. Instead of rising up, the bridge swings to the bank to allow oncoming boats to pass. From the silo in Joel Schelmowitz’s film to the vacant lands and, of course, the canal itself, the view from the bridge perfectly linked all the pieces of our walk together and offered us a moment to discuss the past and the future of the canal and Gowanus.

Hosting everything from off-the grid communes turned drug houses, to houseboat pioneers, to innovative work spaces, to dumpster swimming pools, post-industrial Gowanus has acted as a refuge for the artistic and the eccentric, for the communal enthusiast and the anarchist. And so, the days when the police would comb the canal for bodies, and the density of toxic waste would cause the canal to self-ignite now seem both long gone and not so long gone. With a massive rezoning complete, construction and development efforts stalled, and the Superfund clean up just beginning, I was left wondering what the future will hold for Gowanus. Are the days of dumpster pools and guerrilla film exhibitions on their way out, soon to be replaced by condos and nondescript commercial development? Or, thanks to the economy, are they just warming up?

Photo by Matthew Caron

Meg Kelly is a researcher and designer. As a Fulbright Fellow, she recently completed “Tracing Shifts of Place: Migration, Identity and Landscape in Dharavi,” a year-long oral history project that investigated and documented the physical, political and cultural landscape of one of Asia’s largest and most complex informal communities through the eyes of its youth. She is a former project associate of Urban Omnibus and a current collaborator at UnionDocs.

The views expressed here are those of the author only and do not reflect the position of Urban Omnibus editorial staff or the Architectural League of New York.

Frustrated by the lack of a cohesive vision for the neighborhood and concerned by a failure to connect development plans with broader issues of community services, infrastructure and sustainability, architects and Brooklyn residents David Briggs and Anthony Deen founded the advocacy group Gowanus by Design in 2009. Briggs and Deen wanted to encourage new clean-up and development strategies based on community input and the needs and opinions of those who work and live along the Gowanus. They soon realized that what they saw as the primary challenges for the site could be addressed through a series of design competitions, which would serve to provoke conversation, encourage community engagement and, hopefully, steer future development of the area. The first of these competitions, Gowanus Lowline: Connections, invited designers across disciplines to explore the potential for pedestrian-oriented development that engages with the canal and the surrounding watershed. Here, Briggs and Deen tell us more about the motivations behind and future plans for Gowanus by Design, and share the winning designs from Connections. —C.B.

The Gowanus is a canal and neighborhood under constant assault. For every contamination clean up there is an illegal dumping; for every marine species that returns to the canal there is a toxic overflow from the local CSOs. The nearby areas of Carroll Gardens, Cobble Hill and Boerum Hill are neighborhoods of four and five story buildings, but the City has approved 12-story buildings for two separate major development projects in Gowanus. The fact is, the area suffers because there is no master plan. When the Gowanus Canal was listed on the EPA’s Superfund National Priorities List in early 2010, it was a welcome pause to what was becoming a rapid development process that did not address vital urban issues, such as contextual zoning, mass transit, community services or infrastructure.

The pending development of the Gowanus can also be seen as a local case study of a global trend. As more of our population move to cities — if current trends continue, 70% of the global population will live in urban environments by mid-century — pressure will increase to develop brownfield sites and other contaminated urban areas that were previously considered off-limits due to the extensive remediation they require.

In 2009, we founded Gowanus by Design as a community-based urban design advocacy group in response to these global shifts, our concerns about the trajectory of the proposed development and our desire to help remake our corner of the city. Our mission is to promote sustainable development that enhances the Gowanus Canal community without replacing the historic character and working class origins of the neighborhood, while responding intelligently to the environmental damage wrought by local industry over the past 150 years. Our members are local residents and industry professionals — architects, planners, cartographers and transportation experts. Our aim is to propose and advocate for new strategies for the development of the Gowanus area and to explore the larger urban planning challenges that the world will face as the global population migrates to the world’s cities.

After the Gowanus Canal was designated a Superfund site, our focus shifted towards documenting the cleanup process and taking a step back to consider long-term planning challenges. When discussing how to effectively move forward, we realized that we had to sort through the myriad complex issues being raised in a comprehensive, yet understandable way. By identifying a series of broad questions about the latent problems at the canal, and connecting them to the future of transportation, education, sustainability, infrastructure and community services, we hoped that we could spark conversations that would lead to more research and community input. As our list of questions developed, we decided that each one could form the basis of a design competition, the results of which could create a mappable, online database that would serve to inspire new thinking on urban development.

The Gowanus Lowline jury

This year we launched our inaugural competition, Gowanus Lowline: Connections, as an ideas competition open to the international community. We invited speculation on the value of urban development of post-industrial lands, and the possibility of dynamic, pedestrian-oriented architecture that either passively or actively engaged with the canal and the surrounding watershed. We ended up with 188 submissions, from 14 US States (26 entries came from right here in Brooklyn) and from 14 countries around the world, including Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, England, Finland, France, Germany, India, Italy, Korea, Lithuania and the Netherlands.

On a Friday afternoon in June, the jury convened at the SET Gallery in Brooklyn, located just one block from the canal, for several hours of review and discussion. Comprised of leaders in the design community Julie Bargmann (landscape designer and founding principal of D.I.R.T. Studio), David Lewis (architect and partner of LTL Architects), Gregg Pasquarelli (architect and founding principal of SHoP Architects), Richard Plunz (urban planner and professor at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation), Andrew Simons (designer and chair of Gowanus Canal Conservancy) and Joel Towers (architect and the Dean of Parsons School of Design), the jury focused on thoughtful and rigorous solutions to the problems of urban brownfield sites in general, and the canal area specifically. After much deliberation, they selected first and second prizewinners and four honorable mention winners.

FIRST PLACE
Gowanus Flowlands
Tyler Caine, Luke Carnahan, Ryan Doyle, Brandon Specketer
New York, New York

Click thumbnails to see images from Gowanus Flowlands. Click here for a PDF of the complete entry.

The first prize winner, “Gowanus Flowlands,” was submitted by Tyler Caine, Luke Carnahan, Ryan Doyle and Brandon Specketer of New York, NY. The jury appreciated the team’s understanding of density and environmental remediation as part of a broader sustainable urban strategy. The proposal creates a compelling urban condition through a series of residential and academic buildings that extend above a commercial zone and hover over a series of filtering wetlands. Gowanus Flowlands creatively demonstrates how the area could be inhabited while living with remediation.

SECOND PLACE
[f]lowline
Aptum/Landscape Intelligence: Gale Fulton, Roger Hubeli, Julie Larsen
Urbana, Illinois

Click thumbnails to see images from [f]lowline. Click here for a PDF of the complete entry.

“[F]lowline,” submitted by Aptum/Landscape Intelligence (team members Gale Fulton, Roger Hubeli, Julie Larsen of Urbana, Illinois), was awarded second prize for its clever adaptation and response to changing environmental and urban conditions. As with “Flowlands,” “[f]lowline” proposed living with remediation through a series of insertions, such as pooling parks and floating forest barges, and by doing so, offered a vision of a possible hybrid urban condition.

HONORABLE MENTION
Domestic Laundry: Flush Basin Curtain Mattress Pillow
Agergroup: Jessica Leete, Claire Ji Kim, Shan Shan Lu, Winnie Lai and Albert Chung
Boston, Massachusetts

Click thumbnails to see images from Domestic Laundry. Click here for a PDF of the complete entry.

HONORABLE MENTION
Gowanus Canal Filter District
burkholder|salmons: Sean Burkholder, Dylan Salmons
University Park, Pennsylvania

Click thumbnails to see images from Filter District. Click here for a PDF of the complete entry.

Originally, the competition brief indicated that there would be three honorable mentions. But as the deliberations proceeded through the afternoon, the jury focused on four entries that formed two pairings: “Gowanus Canal Filter District” and “Domestic Laundry: Flush Basin Curtain Mattress Pillow”; and “Made in Brooklyn: Bridges For Local Artisans & Industry” and “B.Y.O.B. (Build Your Own Bridge).”

“Filter District” and “Domestic Laundry” both accepted the existing conditions as a starting point, yet offered different solutions: “Filter District” proposed that three areas south of 3rd Street on both sides of the canal be depressed to promote tidal flushing and create a node point for peripheral development. “Domestic Laundry” offered a range of solutions along both sides of the canal, suggesting a phased, realistic approach that embraced the myriad technologies that the canal cleanup would require.

HONORABLE MENTION
Made in Brooklyn: Bridges For Local Artisans & Industry
Nathan Rich and Miriam Peterson
Brooklyn, New York

Click thumbnails to see images from Made in Brooklyn. Click here for a PDF of the complete entry.

HONORABLE MENTION
B.Y.O.B. (Build Your Own Bridge)
Austin+Mergold LLC: Jason Austin, Alex Mergold, Jessica Brown, Sally Reynolds
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Click thumbnails to see images from B.Y.O.B. Click here for a PDF of the complete entry.

Both “Made in Brooklyn” and “B.Y.O.B.” relied on a more traditional typology to link the neighborhoods on both sides of the canal: the bridge. However, each team was careful to expand on the structure’s conventional use. “Made in Brooklyn” proposed the bridge as a catalyst for growth on either side of the canal by creating a commercial spine on the crossings that would nurture current interest (and pride) in Brooklyn industry. “B.Y.O.B.” proposed various bridge prototypes, designed by local stakeholders, that reflect the existing neighborhood character while connecting current and proposed adjacencies.

After deliberations concluded, we asked the jurors to reflect on Gowanus Lowline and comment on what they’d like to see in future competitions. Several of them noted that more emphasis should be placed on understanding Brooklyn, its character, the local climatic conditions, and, in this particular case, the topography around the canal. Additionally, since the science required to properly remediate the area is truly complex, they suggested that future competitions be designed around some of the specific remediation solutions currently being developed by the EPA as part of the Superfund cleanup process.

As we move forward, our competitions will take the ideas and feedback generated from Gowanus Lowline and continue to explore the broad questions that we think will help people better understand the changes taking place at the canal and in the surrounding neighborhood. We will advocate for new strategies and a sustainable approach to urban development and plan to share our work with local groups, other like-minded professionals, and New York City’s Department of City Planning.

These winning entries from Gowanus Lowline: Connections, along with approximately twenty other thought-provoking entries selected by the committee, and three projects from the seventh grade class of the Brooklyn School for Collaborative Studies, a local middle school, will be on display at the SET Gallery, 287 Third Avenue, Brooklyn for two weeks in September. The show will open on Thursday, September 15, from 6—9pm. For more information, click here.

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After graduating from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, David Briggs worked in upstate New York and for William McDonough in New York City. He opened his own office in 1993 and began working on residential, commercial, and restoration projects that addressed sustainable design issues. In 1997 Mr. Briggs was awarded the AIA New York City Chapter Stewardson Keefe LeBrun Travel Grant. He has also served as a Visiting Critic for the Weimar Bauhaus-Universitat “Summer Academy in Rome” as well as the University of Pennsylvania and taught as an adjunct professor at Philadelphia University. Since 2002, he has served on the Board of Trustees for the Amber Charter School in Harlem where he chairs the Facilities Committee and has been Board Secretary for the past four years. Mr. Briggs is a LEED Accredited Professional and is licensed to practice architecture in New York, New Jersey, Louisiana, and Washington DC. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and two sons.

Anthony Deen is a co-founder of Gowanus by Design, and owner of deenstudio. His projects include work for jetBlue, British Airways and Chelsea Market in New York. Prior to starting deenstudio, Anthony was the Senior Design Director at The Phillips Group, and served as Vice President of Design and Development for the Virgin Megastores in North America. Anthony was also a senior architect with the Rockwell Group where he helped found the Interaction Lab, developing digital media for built environments. Anthony began his career with Samuel Anderson, Winka Dubbeldam and James Garrison, where he won an AIA-NY Project Award. Anthony earned his undergraduate degree at the Cooper Union, graduate degree from Parsons School of Design and did additional study in urban design at the City College of New York. Anthony teaches design studio in the School of Art, Media and Technology at Parsons School of Design where he was the founding director of Parsons’ Design + Technology department. Anthony is also a member of the EPA’s Gowanus Community Advisory Group and lives in Carroll Gardens with his family.

The views expressed here are those of the author only and do not reflect the position of Urban Omnibus editorial staff or the Architectural League of New York.

Artist Rendering of new Whitney Museum | Images by Renzo Piano Building Workshop with Cooper, Robertson & Partners

THE WHITNEY’S NEW HOME
Following last week’s groundbreaking at the Whitney Museum’s future downtown location, New York Magazine’s architecture critic Justin Davidson castigated the museum for what he considers a “monumentally lost opportunity.” The new museum space was designed by acclaimed architect Renzo Piano, whom Davidson accused of capping the High Line “with a pale, metal-clad tower, interlocked with a stack of horizontal blocks that step back in the manner of a clunky cruise ship.” The museum is set to open in 2015. To decide on the design for yourself see it in detail here, and to read more of Davidson on Piano, see the full New York Magazine story.

Gowanus Canal | Image via the New York Daily News

GUNKY GOWANUS
In the latest on the Gowanus Canal cleanup, the New York Post and the New York Daily News reported that two sites readied for development around the Canal for the City’s $300 million “Gowanus Green” housing project still contain toxic contaminants even after a state-monitored clean-up effort seven years ago. One of the largest sources of pollution currently sits under the Lowe’s Home Improvement store, where a black, tarlike substance was found deep in the ground and is still polluting the Canal. Black gunk and yellow liquid containing cancer-causing PAH’s (poly-aromatic hydrocarbons) were discovered recently in the area where Toll Brothers, a development company, had planned an enormous condo project (which they subsequently abandoned following the site’s Superfund designation). The presence of such highly toxic chemicals has alarmed the EPA and raised eyebrows around the effectiveness of the Superfund site’s original clean-up. To read more, see the New York Daily News coverage.

Brownfield Remediation | Image via Omi Industries

GENTRIFYING BROWNFIELDS
CUNY Professor Melissa Checker analyzed the city’s new brownfield redevelopment program in a recent piece for Gotham Gazette, noting development trends in former brownfields geared toward high-income residents and tourists. Brownfields are common in our city (we have an estimated 7,000 acres according to PlaNYC) and are typically characterized by vacant sites contaminated with toxic chemicals such as old gas stations, factories and dry cleaners. Brownfields have historically been avoided by developers due to liability concerns and costly remediation. Up until recently, the City relied on federal and state tax credits to deal with brownfields, classically awarded to higher-income neighborhoods and not to smaller-scale organizations who lack resources to deal with hefty remediation costs. The City’s new Brownfield Cleanup Program (BCP), launched in August 2010, will provide $10 million to remediate brownfields in the city by subsidizing developers’ clean-up costs. The program rewards development in lower-income neighborhoods, which risks gentrifying neighborhoods without public planning processes in place, since generally no community board approval is necessary. To read her full take on brownfields, see Checker’s piece here.

East River Ferry Map | via NY Waterways

EAST RIVER FERRY LAUNCH
The new East River Ferry service will launch on June 13th and, for the first 12 days, the ride is free! After June 25th, the ferry will cost $4 one way, $12 for an unlimited day pass and $140 for an unlimited monthly, as reported by DNAinfo. This much anticipated ferry service is seen as a sustainable, if costly, pilot project for alternative transportation in New York. The ferry line will begin in Long Island City, stop at 34th Street in Manhattan, and make stops in Greenpoint, North Williamsburg, South Williamsburg and DUMBO, ending at Pier 11, just north of the South Street Seaport in Manhattan. In the summer months, ferries will also make stops at Atlantic Avenue (Brooklyn) and Governors Island. Although service is expected every half hour, ferries stop running at 8:30pm on weekends and 9pm on weeknights. The fare cost is subsidized for riders by the City, but will not be a part of the MTA’s fare system. Check out the official East River Ferry Site for full schedules.

Image via NYCwireless

DUMBO’S FREE WiFi
Following the goals outlined in the newly unveiled Roadmap for the Digital City, a developer and non-profit partnership will be providing DUMBO with free, unlimited WiFi. The new network is financed by a developer and is first in the city that offers free wireless, which will be available outdoors between the Manhattan and Brooklyn Bridges. The Dumbo Improvement District collaborated with Two Trees Management Company, a real estate developer in the area, to offer the service as an amenity to attract residents. The neighborhood is currently host to a number of tech start-ups and is an example of what may be in store for the rest of the city.

ANTI-OBESITY BUILDING
The New York Times covered a new eight-story, 63-unit co-op in the Bronx, called ‘The Melody,” which incorporates active living into the design of the building. Host to several anti-obesity design features, the building includes outdoor space with exercise equipment, a naturally-lit gym and signage posted next to strategic, art-lined, music-filled staircases, reading: “A person’s health can be judged by which they take two of at a time, pills or stairs.” The Melody is the first development project to incorporate the City’s Active Design Guidelines, covered in depth in a UO piece by Samir Shah.

EVENT
Our friends at SUPERFRONT Brooklyn invite young designers to develop a temporary installation for SUPERFRONT PUBLIC SUMMER, a design charette to create public space for local performers, non-profits, community groups and other civic-minded groups in formerly industrial space in Industry City. Jurors Vito Acconci (Acconci Studio), K8 Hardy, Mitchell Joachim (Terreform ONE), Olympia Kazi (Van Alen Institute), and Ada Tolla (LOT-EK) will be judging the designs created for Industry City in Sunset Park. The charrette will take place on June 11th, from 2 – 5pm, at 55 33rd Street, 2nd Floor, Brooklyn. Click here for tickets, and to read up on SUPERFRONT, check out the UO piece on them here.

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The Roundup keeps you up to date with topics we’ve featured and other things we think are worth knowing about.

Culver Viaduct | Photo by John McGill

Infrastructure as Urban Opportunity
As infrastructure in our cities reaches and exceeds the end of designed life spans, the necessary upgrades, repair, and replacements to these aging systems require significant public investment. According to the American Society of Civil Engineers, some $2.2 trillion of investment will be needed to address US infrastructure needs in the next five years alone. At the same time, urban park development increasingly involves cooperation with, and concessions to, the private sector to offset the need for public investment. Vacant land suitable and available for new public space and other essential local amenities is, for obvious reasons, hard to come by. It is therefore no surprise that last summer’s opening of the High Line’s first segment was so highly anticipated and widely discussed: infrastructure is increasingly seen as a locus of opportunity.

The seemingly inaccessible and useless spaces of urban infrastructure have a value beyond their (often awkward) adjacency to newly viable real estate: they are already inscribed with highly specific relationships to surrounding urban fabric, and as intervention sites can therefore mediate between radically different scales, speeds, and programs.

Underneath the Culver Viaduct | Photo by John McGill

Activating Urban Void Spaces
Large pieces of transportation infrastructure have traditionally been built to address a singular, performance-driven use, and those conceived and built at a particular moment in history were often over-engineered to accommodate (or privilege) other layers above, below and adjacent. Precisely because of these attributes, they serve as translators between adjacent systems, producing as byproduct large volumes of space with odd relationships to surrounding buildings, streets, and their respective orientations. These transportation systems offer a scaffold that is scaled to the city, relevant to its history, and generally oversized but underused – structures that have the latent potential to organize public space more actively and to support a vibrant mixture of urban programs based on immediate local needs and conditions.

As these systems age and must be upgraded or replaced they provide a unique opportunity for us to expand the meaning and scope of “adaptive reuse” in the urban context. The ubiquity of such decaying structures in our cities, and their resulting firm – but conceptually uncertain – presence in the public conscience, suggests an inherent economy by which space can be found for activities that are unlikely to be adequately addressed by conventional development scenarios.

Layers of space formerly ignored or associated with the banality of a particular engineering problem must now be reconsidered and addressed in this moment of heightened interest and investment in infrastructural upgrades and repair. By actively engaging them, such spaces can be folded into the public realm, making them at once more legible and less obtrusive to contemporary patterns of land use, transportation and culture. This strategy instrumentalizes infrastructure for public use and local benefit, not as an afterthought to private development but as an existing and potent prefigurative device for urban change.

The Culver Viaduct
In the Gowanus, what appears to many an abandoned and contaminated area standing as an impediment to economic development is in fact already teeming with activity, albeit behind closed doors and at a relatively small scale compared to the area’s more intensive industrial past. What is lacking is a coherent and legible public arena in which interaction among the diverse group of current users can occur. Indeed, while public access to the canal is no longer blocked by active industry, it will remain mostly sealed off as the estimated 12-year Superfund cleanup process begins.

The Culver Viaduct, which carries Brooklyn’s F and G subway lines over the Gowanus Canal, offers a prime opportunity to implement precisely this strategy. Given its legitimate place in local history and the public imagination, the viaduct offers an ideal armature within which to stage a new set of conditions for the broader Gowanus site, without touching the most ecologically damaged areas at all. And it happens to be currently undergoing a $300 million replacement of its concrete structural deck. What follows is Underline, my design proposal for the Culver Viaduct — an opportunistic repurposing of existing, functioning infrastructure to address the need for a vibrant and coherent public realm. Unlike the High Line and many other recent adaptive reuse projects that employ linear infrastructure as an armature, this strategy is not dependent upon the termination of active rail (or other) service in order to produce viable sites for intervention.

Site History
When completed in 1938, the Culver Viaduct was the only elevated portion of the original Independent Subway system, and reached a height of 90 feet above grade in order to accommodate tall ships on the Gowanus Canal while also supporting two above ground stations. With the canal and its banks recently designated a Federal Superfund site (in March, 2010) and now mostly unused for shipping of any kind, the extreme vertical separation of these layers can be reconsidered: the concrete structure both offers large volumes of valuable “free” space and is the threshold to contaminated ground.

Because the curving train line is not constrained to the urban grid, the structural piers transpose the geometry of the rail bed to the streets below, with columns landing on sidewalks but not the streets themselves. The result is an array of unique spatial conditions, each with a slightly different disposition relative to surrounding streets and buildings.

The structure’s dimensions, despite being highly irregular and specific to local structural demands and adjacent site constraints, are ideal for inhabitation – increments are generally between 15 and 20 feet in each axis, providing spaces of a useful scale.

Underline Section | Rendering by John McGill

The Scheme
Four types of “preservation” emerged as essential to the architectural strategy: preservation of sunlight, of structural stability, of limited footprint at ground level, and of existing (historic) character. Informed by these criteria, Underline offers four potential modes of intervention: the creation of flexible space for public assembly; precast concrete decking hung from above on steel rods as a public landscape “ribbon;” pure infill at ground level; and adaptive reuse of, or interface with, existing adjacent structures.

Sunlight animates the existing structure and is essential to the unique experience found on the sidewalks around Smith and 9th Streets. Aggressive infill of the viaduct’s undercarriage – a strategy often employed in Europe – would compromise this special quality and risk casting a shadow over any future street life. A 3D analysis of solar exposure within the space of the viaduct throughout the year revealed that despite its inherent drama at sunset, it remains dark throughout most of the day, year round.

Underline Solar Exposure Analysis | John McGill

The solar analysis led to a strategy of puncturing the deck of the viaduct strategically, cutting openings within the supporting piers and inserting steel lattice “skylights” to carry the rails overhead. Enclosed volumes of multipurpose classroom space could then be clustered below the openings, within the existing structural frames. Each volume is shaped by the angles at which the sun tends to reach the street below, so that the persistence of large areas of shadow is minimized. By night the relationship reverses: prismatic volumes glow with artificial light, projecting it into the darkness of the canal.

In order to preserve the integrity of the existing structure, asymmetrical loads would have to be avoided. We can’t assume that the existing reinforced concrete truss members are capable of carrying additional load. This means that the route of the pedestrian ribbon is largely dictated by the clearances found within and between the trusses at various heights above the street, and the places where it can be fastened to the re-engineered deck above for support. In areas where existing (but unused) playgrounds and vacant land exist beneath or adjacent to the viaduct, the landscape ribbon is free to move outboard to form the roof for new enclosed spaces below, and offers views and pedestrian access into each space. The ribbon tapers and swells as it moves through the structure, seeking light and connecting opportunistically between discreet elements of the program.

Underline Pedestrian Walkway | Rendering by John McGill

The fourth mode of intervention, adaptive reuse, occurs primarily at the concrete plant at Smith and 9th Streets, which is the only active business immediately adjacent to both the viaduct and the canal itself. Once decommissioned, the structure could be reinvented as a climbing wall – an injection of new activity to animate and preserve an evocative and representative historic structure.

Preserving this set of desirable existing conditions results in a series of distributed spaces connected by a linear public park. This establishes a sequence of unique visual experiences as one moves along, offering glimpses of unexpected adjacent activities, the regular appearance of moving trains overhead, and the rhythmic discharge and departure of passengers to and from the stations at either end of the project site — not to mention views of the city currently reserved for F and G subway riders.

Despite being distributed, however, the program is arranged in discernible clusters so that points of access to each component of the project are clearly legible from the street. Starting from the south, the first of these might contain an EPA monitoring station and public exhibition space, a café, public outdoor amphitheater, rock-climbing wall, and classrooms. The next section consists of covered outdoor basketball courts and a small public fitness center and lap pool, and in the final group retail and production spaces. Because each element is knit into the whole by the landscape ribbon, a loose affiliation emerges between both related and unrelated events in time and space.

Underline Public Amphitheater | Rendering by John McGill

The project also includes a provision for storm water collection on the surface of the rail deck, with drains feeding hanging gardens of deciduous vines suspended on wire mesh from the rods supporting the landscape ribbon, as well as the plantings along the ribbon itself. Such plants would perform in two ways – filtering and retaining storm water before it reaches the street or the canal as runoff, and filtering light during the summer to shield passersby. As a repetitive element related to the structural cadence of the existing viaduct, the hanging vines would further reinforce existing tensions between the geometry of the viaduct and the city around it.

Initially an elevated platform for public observation of a compromised landscape, this thin viaduct could eventually shed its image of forbidding overpass, under which people move by default, confined by fences and traffic, and emerge as a vital, engaging public passageway and gateway – a shift from mere edge to public threshold.

Underneath the Culver Viaduct | Photo by John McGill

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John McGill is a designer at WRNS Studio in San Francisco and a recent graduate of the masters program in Architecture at UC Berkeley, where he occasionally teaches as a lecturer in architecture. He grew up in Carroll Gardens riding the F train and now lives in Berkeley.

The views expressed here are those of the author only and do not reflect the position of Urban Omnibus editorial staff or the Architectural League of New York.

The Gowanus Canal | Courtesy of Team NC State

The Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn was once a meandering tidal creek whose brackish waters produced oysters so succulent and sizable they were harvested by the Dutch settlers and shipped back to Europe by the barrel-full. With the growth of industry and the concomitant population explosion in Brooklyn in the middle of the 19th century, the old Gowanus Creek was channeled and deepened to create the 1.8 mile-long canal, finished in 1869. By 1906 there were over 85 barge trips per working day and the canal was a “maritime superhighway for barges bearing coal, sand, oil, and brick.”

Barge traffic on the Gowanus Canal in 1940, Brooklyn Daily Eagle, courtesy of the Brooklyn Public Library

Today the primary function of the Gowanus Canal is as a collector outlet for 14 of the combined sewer overflow points in Brooklyn. If you are ever by the Canal during the rain, an acrid stink reminiscent of Dante’s fumache lagoni will wash over you thanks to a mix of raw sewage, heavy metals, petrochemicals, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) and polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) in the deep sediments and waters of the Canal. The blocks immediately adjacent to the Canal have been left mostly to bus repair shops, industrial scrap yards, concrete plants, the vacant vestiges of past energy industries, and carting companies that lumber through Brooklyn at night.

And yet, the Canal has a certain sublime attraction. The F/G trains and the Gowanus Expressway cross overhead and at night the little lights emanating from the subway cars are beautiful. If you go there on the right night, watch the subway crawl along the tracks, see the distant skyline of Brooklyn and Manhattan, and notice the bats diving for insects against the dark silhouettes of the strange warehouses and factories, you will discover an entirely new side of New York City.

Of course, the Canal was not always seen in this light, and will not always be like this. With the slowing of industrial activity in the 1940′s and the ceasing of regular dredging operations by the Army Corps of Engineers in 1955, the lands and waters were left open for new agents who could find room to operate here, whether they be blue crabs and swallows or artists, the homeless, school teachers with a bivalve interest, or private developers. It is terrain vague, an “abandoned area, obsolete and unproductive… which represents an anonymous reality.” [sic]¹ And this terrain vague permits new uses to arise.  As such it is can operate simultaneously as an open sewer, ecological laboratory, and hipster playpen.

A member of the Canal Nest Colony team installs one of the first birdhouses along the Gowanus Canal

The Colony’s History
In November 2008, Urban Omnibus partnered with Bryan Bell, founder of Design Corps, to hold a design/build event encouraging designers to “make a difference in two days,” an exercise in design activism. Four intrepid designers living in Brooklyn got together and entered the event, deciding to create a small colony of birdhouses for the urban birds living along the canal. They called it the Canal Nest Colony (CNC). Most interesting, they liked what they were doing and decided to keep it going. Throughout the fall of 2008 and the next spring, they kept cutting up and painting pieces of scrap wood and turning them into little yellow birdhouses.

Courtesy of Thomas Ryan

The design of the houses is sophisticated and lovely. Scraps from local cabinet makers are fastened atop an old reject piece of scaffolding, which is then cast in a 5-gallon bucket partially filled with concrete. The cost per birdhouse is a couple of dollars and each house is a mobile unit that can be inserted or relocated into almost any crevice along the Gowanus. The benefit to the community is not limited to the strength of their design. Birds can be an indicator of ecosystem biodiversity and environmental health in urban areas. And people like birds — it is fun to see them hunt and fly and build, they have different colors and behaviors, and many of them migrate, marking the changing of seasons and passage of time.

In 2009, a few folks from the Gowanus Canal Conservancy (GCC) took notice. The GCC is a community non-profit group that works to address some of the legacy issues of the Gowanus Canal and to encourage community members from local businesses, schools and neighborhood organizations to engage in the clean-up and maintenance of the Canal and its surrounding environment.

The GCC began helping the CNC obtain materials and a workspace. In return, the CNC offered their birdhouse initiative as an organizing mechanism for the community volunteer days. Suddenly, volunteers had a wider variety of activities to engage in — bolting, painting, digging, hammering, and pouring concrete in addition to the weeding and picking up trash that dominated earlier events — and the “clean and green” days ended not only with an cleaned patch of ground along the Canal, but also with the construction of something interesting.

The Colony’s Activity
Over the course of 2009, the CNC’s collaboration with the GCC progressed and 25 new bird and bat houses were designed, built and installed. The delicate yellow boxes were beautiful by the oily blues and rusting browns of the Canal. The bucket-footing allowed for the houses to migrate season to season, slowly finding their way to the micro-habitats along the Canal that best suit different bird species. The CNC team fine-tuned the design and placement of the houses, thanks to suggestions of members from the New York City Audubon Society, and enhanced the habitats with plantings to provide cover and food for the birds and welcoming gardens for the neighbors.

2010 brought efforts to expand the initiative through grant proposals, donations and partnerships. In May, the Department of Sanitation (DOS) granted use of a one-acre lot to the project team, a site situated at a bend in the canal where 2nd Avenue dead-ends, used during the winter for salt and sand storage but vacant throughout the rest of the year. Plant material was donated by Pleasant Run Nursery in New Jersey, mulch was donated by the Department of Parks and Recreation, a shipping container was donated for storage, and a small urban nursery was set up to store and care for the trees and shrubs until they could be installed.

Community volunteers paint and assemble birdhouses at one of the Gowanus Canal Conservancy's community Clean and Green days in 2009

The volunteer community began to grow. An event held at the end of May brought over one hundred people down to the canal to help install a new garden at the end of First Street. But even with the increased community participation, the expansion of both scope and area site coverage meant the participants’ efforts were spread too thin. Mid-season, the team decided to rein in the ambition and focus on site improvements near the Salt Lot. By clustering all of the services and activities in one spot, they created a destination along the canal. The Salt Lot and its sublime surroundings now offer one of the few places to observe and take in the canal and its rhythms.

The Salt Lot at the end of 2nd Avenue in Brooklyn

Work continued through the summer. Many of the plants at First Street died during the hottest days of the summer, and weeds and trash always return. But excitement is building. A large composting operation is getting started, more birdhouses have been installed and plantings have been established along the banks of the canal, which may draw more people and provide habitat and food for birds. The seasonal nursery has proved a great success logistically, piqued neighborhood interest and enabled the ecological initiatives of the CNC project.

The Colony’s Future
The future of the Canal Nest Colony must be seen in the context of the other initiatives birthed along the Gowanus Canal in recent years. In addition to the vestigial industrial uses — scrap yards, bus repair shops, concrete plants, and warehouses — the 00’s saw a wealth of endeavors by idiosyncratic communities emphasizing experimentation and education, labor, and hedonism. In addition to the Canal Nest Colony, the Dredgers, the Oyster Farm, and the Dumpster Pool, the Gowanus was also the site of the Sponge Park Study and the Oyster-Tecture proposal and was made an Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Superfund site. And the GCC has begun design work for a series of EPA and DEP-funded pilot projects in the vicinity to study strategies for stormwater retention.

Map via thiscityismine.com/gowanus

In its capacity to attract creative/scientific agents the Gowanus Canal is a testament to the enduring ability of post-industrial wastelands to captivate the contemporary urban imagination, at least of those fortunate enough to have a bit of leisure time. And that is a key point; livelihood is now divorced from hard labor, and the result is a massive portion of the population that no longer desires recreation solely in the form of repose and “healthful socializing.” While the consumption of public spaces and experiences — spectacle — is still the dominant mode of recreation, the efforts along the Gowanus Canal offer evidence that there is a desire for other types of recreation, ones that involve work, especially working with your hands.

As for the Canal Nest Colony specifically, this fall the team will be working with MillionTreesNYC to get new trees delivered and cared for until they are installed with volunteer help in October. Next year the composting operation will be fully functional, the seasonal nursery will be back, and new locations for better birdhouses will be scouted. Perhaps a study will be done of the plant communities that have colonized the banks of the Canal and their horticultural and ecological value can be understood and publicized. The energy and support of the Gowanus Canal Conservancy will surely influence the direction, and the GCC will be working on related pilot projects, and new volunteers and teammates will likely contribute new ideas.

The efforts on the Gowanus, nascent though they may be, are evidence of the potential good that can come from communities of different scales and motivations — city government, local organizations, engaged residents — working together, in even the most ghastly of locations, to improve their surroundings and do something fun together.

A vision for one of the new gardens along the Gowanus Canal

For a reminder of the origins of this project, check out the video below that we shot of the team designing and building the birdhouses during the Make a Difference in Two Days event:
[See post to watch Flash video]

¹ “Terrain Vague”, Ignasi Sola Morales, AA.VV. 1996

FASLANYC works as a landscape architect for an urban design firm in New York City. He also writes the landscape criticism blog faslanyc and contributes to other design journals with features focusing on urban projects in South America.

The views expressed here are those of the author only and do not reflect the position of Urban Omnibus editorial staff or the Architectural League of New York.

Tomorrow, Saturday, July 24th, the Metropolitan Waterfront Alliance is hosting the third annual City of Water Day Festival. Head to Governors Island, Brooklyn Bridge Park, Liberty State Park and the Atlantic Basin for free harbor boat tours, a children’s festival, live music, and a film expo. (If you find yourself on Governors Island, don’t forget to visit the League’s current exhibition, The City We Imagined/The City We Made, on view in Building 110 through August 15!)

Park development and renovation has been a recent topic of interest for cities worldwide. Next Tuesday, July 27th, there will be a Freshkills Park Talk on that very subject. Entitled “Innovative Parks for Resurgent Cities,” the lecture will feature Peter Harnik, Director of the Center for City Park Excellence at the Trust for Public Land. Reading from and talking about his book of the same name, he will discuss how these new parks are revitalizing previously unused public space and how city planners can add green space in built-out cities. In anticipation of the talk, check out Gotham Gazette for a piece on Harnik, his book, and the politics and planning behind open space in New York City.

New York City is becoming an easier and safer place for senior citizens to live. A number of small, “age-friendly” adjustments are already being implemented, such as increasing the duration of walk signs and providing school buses for trips to the grocery. But that’s just a start. The New York Times reports that the city is in the midst of establishing two “aging improvement districts,” an initiative presented to the City Council and Mayor Bloomberg’s office by the New York Academy of Medicine. The details are still in the works, but it sounds like the planning team should take a look at Interboro’s research into NORCs (Naturally Occurring Retirement Communities) in NYC.

The revival of many New York City neighborhoods was tied largely to the renovation and refurbishment of thousands of apartment buildings in the city. However, given the current economic climate, many of these buildings are falling back into disrepair, as tenants are unable to pay their rent, or owners their mortgages. The city once owned many of these properties as a result of tax delinquencies and was widely criticized for how it managed their care, and has no interest in taking them over again. New owners for such buildings are scarce right now, and residents of central Brooklyn, the South Bronx and Harlem in particular are feeling the impact as their neighborhoods, after a period of revitalization, are deteriorating once again.

The Gowanus Canal, recently named a Superfund site by the EPA, has been fitted with a oxygenation system, temporarily replacing a flushing tunnel that is under repair. Part of a $140 million, four-year plan by the EPA, the added oxygen, which determines the water’s ability to sustain life, and repaired flushing tunnel will allow the Gowanus to meet recreational regulations for boating and fishing by the project’s end.

The Roundup keeps you up to date with topics we’ve featured and other things we think are worth knowing about. Photo by Flickr user cyu06.

Since the Omnibus crew decamped from our previous digs on the banks of the Gowanus Canal this past fall, we’ve tried to hold ourselves back from reblogging every time its tortuous path to cleanup makes the news. But today that path became a little clearer – the Canal has been designated a Federal Superfund site. According to The New York Times, “The E.P.A. estimates that the federal cleanup will last 10 to 12 years and cost $300 million to $500 million.” The City expressed disappointment; its own plan claimed to be “a faster route to a Superfund-level cleanup and would have avoided the issues associated with a Superfund listing” including costly litigation and a stigma that will likely change development priorities. Nonetheless, spokespeople for City Hall have promised to work closely with federal agencies to achieve everyone’s stated goal – a clean canal.

In addition to following canal news closely in our roundups, we’ve reviewed art projects about it, shared videos shot along it, and co-hosted (along with our friends at the Center for Urban Pedagogy) a live talk show that went beyond the slugfest community meetings about Superfund designation to mine the environmental and biological histories of toxins. To analyze the EPA’s Superfund program in the context of emerging art forms informed by both eco-visualization and internet-based art practice. To connect the local landscape to national precedents. To ponder what any of this has to do with the ethics of risk, the implications for financing local development, the design of our environments. Given today’s news, maybe it’s time for a look back at some of the ideas that emerged from that event. Below are video excerpts from the presentations of our three panelists last summer, artist Brooke Singer, environmental historian Sarah Vogel and environmental activist Anne Rabe.

The city has been abuzz with news of the Bloomberg administration’s $95.6 million deal with Thor Equities for 6.9 acres in Coney Island. Read about the details in the city’s press release or the New York Times, and then check out the land in question from a bird’s-eye view (toy helicopter’s-eye view, actually) in this lovely video tour of Coney by Jason Lam (embedded above, via Gothamist). Now that the announcement has been made, the city is charging forward – requests for proposals are already going out.

Things aren’t quite as busy everywhere – Brownstoner tells us that the Department of Buildings’ stalled construction site count is continuing to climb. The latest report lists 527 dormant lots across the five boroughs.

Coney Island isn’t the only competing plan Bloomberg has been advocating for. The mayor is also fiercely defending his plan to clean up the Gowanus without the need for Superfund designation. Matt Chaban at the Architect’s Newspaper breaks down the city’s plan and looks at what it might mean for the city.

Karrie Jacobs, who was kind enough to join in on the fun at last month’s Atlantic-Pacific meet-up, also has some ideas for the highway system. Read her editorial in the Times where she imagines “a kind of adaptive reuse” for the Interstate.

On Tuesday the 17th Transportation Alternatives kicks off its new campaign at BAMCinematek with Biking Rules PSA Film Festival, a night of films that promote safe, civic-minded cycling in NYC, with prizes for jury-selected winners and free beer from Brooklyn Brewery for all.

The Roundup keeps you up to date with topics we’ve featured and other things we think are worth knowing about.