On August 6th, a small group gathered around artist Mary Mattingly to listen to “The Story of Flock House,” a history of her current work-in-progress and its corresponding exhibit, The Investigation, Constitution and Formation of Flock House, currently on view at the LMCC’s Art Center on Governors Island. Flock House is a prototype nomadic living system made of recycled materials that is designed to latch onto urban buildings and structures to establish symbiotic relationships with them and those who will reside in it.

Mattingly presented her talk in the LMCC gallery, an intimate setting that allowed the event to progress as a conversation rather than a lecture. The gallery space holds a compilation of bits and pieces of the elements that have both generated and been generated by the Flock House project – from diagrams and sketches to sculptures and photographs. Born in 2010, the House is the sequel to Mattingly’s Waterpod project, a floating mobile dwelling, also made of recycled materials, that aims to push the boundaries of the ever-densifying city into New York’s waterways. Flock House, much like the Waterpod, offers a malleable and fluctuating space that migrates around New York City, this time pushing the city into the limitless sky.

Flock House Installation at 33 Flatbush Avenue | via marymattingly.com

The first photograph of Mattingly’s presentation, a black and white print of a wooden house on wheels in Northern Connecticut in which she was raised, made clear the early origins of her fascination with nomadic living systems. But the concept of a perched, autonomous living system did not occur to Mattingly until she was navigating around the five boroughs during her Waterpod journey. Throughout these travels, she encountered a new fascination: industrial waterfront cranes and the operators’ cabs affixed to them. She began to imagine migratory houses with hanging gardens tethered to old structures, wondering “Is this the future of New York?” Mattingly and a few of her friends moved into one of these perched crane-top cabins and lived there until they were kicked out for legal reasons. Unimpeded, Mattingly established a relationship with Al Attara, a Brooklyn landlord with community-driven, eco-friendly visions, who gave her permission to use the rooftop of 33 Flatbush Avenue – a sanctuary of communal spaces for artists and entrepreneurs — as the birthplace for the House.

Flock House began to materialize. Mattingly and her collaborators gradually collected recycled materials (mostly abandoned vehicle parts and construction materials), planted vegetation and, with the help of architecture students, constructed a pathway of wooden planks. In summer 2010, a prototype of the House was installed at Smack Mellon Gallery to allow for greater public access to the work-in-progress.

Flock House Installation at Smack Mellon | via marymattingly.com

Though Flock House is constantly undergoing changes as a basic principle, certain components are set in stone. The fiberglass exterior shell is made of recycled industrial materials that have been crushed and re-casted into an organic sphere with open patches intended to mimic human migratory patterns around the globe. Its size is fixed to match the width of a highway lane for travelling purposes. This shell, however, wraps around a modular skeleton comprised of steel bars that can be hinged and unhinged into any desired shape. Eventually, the House will be able to latch onto other structures. Inhabitants will use collected rainwater to shower, drink and grow vegetation, and solar and human power to generate energy. (The team of architecture students collaborating with Mattingly is currently studying human power systems.)

The Governors Island exhibit presents a myriad of fantastical, non-functional, self-sufficient systems constituted of recycled materials: a vibration-powered light system; an air-purifier that sucks smog in and releases clean air, potable water, and fertilizer; a build-your-own-island system; a wearable home; and a bike-powered water purification system. Mattingly intentionally staged a conceptual show, presenting her interest in the fantastic and the plausible existence of such systems in the future, rather than their engineered actualization. But she also used charming subtleties, such as a rock under one of the wheels of bicycle system that would hypothetically hinder it from moving forward, to draw the viewer back to the real-world relevance of the systems she imagines. Infused throughout the installation is Mattingly’s criticism of the hasty pace of our times: “The more we speed up, the more we need to slow down.”

Air Ship Arecibo City | via robertmann.com

Perfection is by no means Mattingly’s ambition. She is not on a mission to reinvent living systems as perfectly autonomous utopic habitats. In fact, she was pleasantly surprised to encounter new obstacles from destination point to destination point during her travels in the Waterpod. Likewise, Flock House is meant to rely upon the symbiotic relationships that will emerge in each of its new environments. She references Archigram’s Plug-in City ­– a framework for an imaginary city with components that are plugged in and consistently reorganized – as inspiration. Through interdependent relationships, the project will encourage human collaboration and teamwork, a crucial element for the future of our cities.

Though Flock House’s journey has not yet been fully choreographed, a few of its destination points are nearly definite, including Times Square, Brooklyn Bridge Park and Snug Harbor, and it is scheduled to commence its travels with invited guests in May 2012. And though the House is a tangible project with a concrete plan of action, The Investigation, Constitution, and Formation of Flock House bears the form of a conceptual alternative to urban development. Flock House itself is simply a more elaborate manifestation of Mattingly’s dreamlike collages and of her endearingly clumsy “system” sculptures; a baby-step towards awareness.

The Investigation, Constitution and Formation of Flock House is on view through August 14.

Claire Ross is currently a project assistant at Urban Omnibus and will soon be obtaining her M.Arch at the City College of New York. She grew up in New York, Philadelphia and France’s Cote d’Azur and now lives in Manhattan.

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.

Urban Umbrella design by Young Hwan Choi, with Andrés Cortés, AIA, and Sarrah Khan, PE, of Agencie Group.

URBAN UMBRELLA
Two years ago, the NYC Department of Buildings and AIA New York sponsored a design competition to develop an innovative solution for city scaffolding. This week, the winning team unveiled the prototype of the “urban umbrella.” The UrbanSHED competition asked designers to create better “sidewalk sheds” — the ubiquitous blue plywood and metal scaffolding structures seen around town. The winning design comes from Young-Hwan Choi with architect Andrés Cortés and engineer Sarrah Khan of New York-based Agencie Group, who won $25,000 for their efforts. This prototype was constructed by Brooklyn-based architecture and fabrication firm Caliper Studio. “Urban umbrellas” feature modular metal canopies, optimized to allow natural light to reach the sidewalk and designed for cost and structural integrity, that can be custom-installed to meet site dimensions. LED lights will light up the shed at night, which will make for a far safer pedestrian overhang. See a slideshow of the prototype at Inhabitat and read more on this from The Architect’s Newspaper.

Real estate holdings of key players in higher education

CAMPUS HOLDINGS
Mitchell Moss, Professor of Urban Policy and Planning at the Wagner Graduate School of Public Service at New York University, wrote a compelling piece for The Architect’s Newspaper on recent development trends tied to hotspots of higher education in the city. Illustrated with this beautiful map, Moss points to the fact that the city’s colleges and universities are building up and out at a time when other development is in decline. He cites an incredible statistic: “There are twice as many people enrolled in degree programs in New York City than live in the entire city of Buffalo.” Using every planner’s tool in the box, from eminent domain, rezoning, leasing, trading air rights, public-private partnerships, strategic acquisitions, to contributing space for public purposes, campuses are expanding. The most notable expansions include an additional 6.8 million square feet to Columbia’s current 17-acre Manhattanville campus, an additional 396,000 square feet to CUNY’s 3 million square foot campus, and new buildings for SVA, the New School, and Cooper Union.

Parallel Networks, designed by Ali Fard and Ghazal Jafari of Canada for Water as 6th Borough Competition

PARALLEL NETWORKS
As a challenge to envision “Water as the Sixth Borough of NYC,” the annual 2011 Terreform ONE prize asked designers to develop a vision for New York City’s future waterway use and to connect this idea with the upcoming Clean Tech World Expo. Designs focused on New York’s waterways, recreational space, transportation and local industry. The grand prize winners, Ali Fard and Ghazal Jafari of Canada, titled their work “Parallel Networks,” and received $10,000 for their work. “Parallel Networks” features a flexible network of floating pods which function as islands for public space and habitat space, with renewable energy, water filtration and food production elements. The pods are easily moveable and adapt to their environment. The modular, add-on system can be grown to diverse scales or could start small, holding potential for adaptation to climate change and other factors. See the full winning design here, as well as other honorable mentions.

FOOD POLICY
New York City Council enacted five bills and several resolutions this week, intending to bring more locally produced food to city residents, schools and jails. The passed initiatives were largely distilled from Speaker Christine Quinn’s “FoodWorks New York,” the proposed comprehensive food system plan for New York City. According to Quinn, New York is the second largest institutional purchaser of food in the city, after the U.S. Department of Defense, which hints at the huge potential these efforts have to influence the region’s food market. Notable measures include: amending administrative code to encourage the purchasing of food grown and processed in New York State; Intro 338-A, which aims to make it easier to construct rooftop greenhouses; and Intro 615, which requires an annual report on the food system from City administration. For more on the benefits and challenges of the City Council’s legislation, take a look at this blog on food policy and this recent piece published in Gotham Gazette by Nevin Cohen, food policy expert and Professor at the New School (who also spoke with us last year about the Five Borough Farm project).

Growing produce in milk crates at Riverpark restaurant

POP-UP FARM IN MIDTOWN?
GOOD Magazine reported this week that a food-producing pop-up farm has been constructed east of the FDR drive in Midtown. The farm sits in the middle of what should have been the Alexandria Center, a bioscience complex that has since been stalled by its developer. Instead of letting the space go,  the developer has partnered with GrowNYC to grow fresh vegetables for Chef Tom Colicchio’s Riverpark restaurant. All the vegetables have been planted in removable milk crates for the time being, considering the site will likely be built out at some point in the future. New York City has more than 600 stalled construction sites and 596 acres of vacant public land. Could milk crate farms be the future for urban ag? See more at GOOD.is.

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ReOrder, Brooklyn Museum | Photo by Keith Sirchio

Sigfus Breidfjord, Basar Girit, Aleksey Lukyanov-Cherny, Wes Rozen and Bradley Samuels are collectively known as Situ Studio. Situ is a design, fabrication and research firm that challenges conventional notions of what a design studio does. They define themselves as “a creative practice that engages in experimental work in a variety of media” with “a commitment to both material investigation as well as research and writing [that] allows for the studio to develop flexible and multifaceted strategies to approach spatial problems.”

Multifaceted is right. Situ’s practice straddles all sorts of disciplinary boundaries. You may have seen their finely-crafted models in the 2009 Guggenheim exhibition Frank Lloyd Wright: From Within Outward, or their three Solar Pavilions which popped up everywhere from Stuyvesant Cove Park to All Points West to the Scope Art Fair in Miami. The studio collaborates with artists (Alyson Shotz, Mara Haseltine, Sarah Oppenheimer, Sebastien Leon Agneessens), architects (Diller Scofidio + Renfro, Eisenman, OMA, SOM, Snøhetta, Field Operations) and institutions (Harvard’s Dept. of Earth & Planetary Sciences, Storm King, MoMA) on sculpture, prototype development, parametric modeling and manufacturing. They have worked with Princeton Geosciences Professor Adam Maloof to develop 3D fossil reconstructions for morphogenetic analysis. And they conducted spatial analysis of video footage from a 2009 protest in the West Bank village of Bil’in, with Goldsmiths College of London’s Forensic Architecture Project and the human rights organization B’Tselem, as part an investigation into the death of a demonstrator.

The reOrder installation and its use as the setting for the upcoming museum event prompted us to start a conversation with the Situ team about their approach to designing spaces for public assembly, the role of the architect in catalyzing social interaction and how the traditional and the nontraditional aspects of their practice inform and enhance one another. Read on, and if you want to hear more from Situ Studio, sign up for the League’s upcoming tour of reOrder led by Aleksey and Wes from Situ Studio and Sharon Matt Atkins, Managing Curator of Exhibitions at the Brooklyn Museum, on May 12. Or come have a drink with the team at next week’s Brooklyn Artists Ball After Party.  -V.S.

Sections of Trezona Fossil

Urban Omnibus: How did Situ Studio start?
Situ Studio: We, the founding partners, began working together while still in architecture school at the Cooper Union and formally founded Situ Studio shortly after graduating in 2005. The dual role of design and fabrication in our practice evolved from a commitment to working in the manner we had become accustomed to at school. Cooper has a tremendous shop and has always placed a lot of importance on craft. When we began our own practice, it was important to us that we set up a space that would allow us to move fluidly between the virtual and physical. The ability to interrogate ideas through experimentation of material behavior and mockups at a range of scales has become one of the core values of the practice.

reOrder, elevation

Tell us about your current installation at the Brooklyn Museum, reOrder. How did that opportunity come about?
We became acquainted with the director of the museum, Arnold Lehman, during Art Basel Miami in 2007 when he stepped into one of our Solar Pavilions. A three-year-long conversation followed, first discussing how we might install one of our pavilions in the museum and eventually concluding with a plan for a site-specific installation in the Great Hall.

Transforming the Great Hall from Situ Studio on Vimeo. Tracking time-lapse video made in the Brooklyn Museum’s Great Hall during the installation of reOrder. Camera moves 700 feet over 3 weeks, taking a photograph every 2 minutes, presenting 200 hours of installation work. Video by Situ Studio with Nathan Levine-Heaney and Jeffrey Blair.

The Brooklyn Museum is a building with a long history of architectural transformations. With reOrder, we wanted to engage the ideals of proportion and ornament that were central in McKim, Mead & White’s original design. The 16 columns that define the Great Hall are augmented in an attempt to humanize the colossal space and better serve the needs of the contemporary public institution. The ornamental bases of the columns have been rescaled to become furniture elements and a flexible system of canopies reach out from the columns to break up the space above. By creating a range of spatial conditions and places to pause, we hope visitors will interact with the architecture and with each other on a more intimate level.

What do you see as the role of the architect in activating space for public use and assembly or catalyzing social interaction?
Architecture is a visionary profession. The agency of an architect lies in his or her ability to affect patterns of motion and direct attention toward new subjects, either social or environmental. The first step in creating a place for novel interaction is by creating a place for pause. Once people are interrupted, or surprised, they can more easily turn their attention to new conversations.

Solar Pavilion 3 at CitySOL, NYC, 2008

How do you see the role of pavilions and temporary installations in your practice? What are your thoughts on their role in architectural practice and urban space more broadly?
Pavilions and temporary installations have figured centrally in the first five years of our practice. Working on ephemeral structures has given us opportunities to explore a range of design strategies that would have been far more difficult to propose and pursue on permanent structures — at least as a young practice. As experiments that are limited in scale but require considerable coordination, temporary installations have served as opportunities to explore new tools, techniques and design strategies.

Solar Pavilion 2 at SCOPE Art Fair, Miami, 2007

For us, these tend to be projects that take no more than a year to complete and exist outside of the standard chain of work flow and attendant legal/bureaucratic hurdles that define so much of what we as designers engage in. Having a studio in which we can fabricate most (in some cases all) of these temporary structures allows us to abandon the “off the shelf” logic that can constrain architecture and limit designers to a predetermined array of material and hardware choices.

We developed and fabricated unique components and hardware for both the reOrder and Solar Pavilion projects, and while it was extremely exciting to see these play out in the work it was equally important to have developed a system for the production of custom parts — one that could be potentially applied to future projects. We’re now finding that these experiments inevitably find their way back into projects of greater complexity, coordination and permanence. While the temporary structures present unique opportunities for us as a young firm, we imagine these types of bracketed spatial investigations will persist in our practice as we continue to get larger commissions.

Flight 587 Memorial dedication ceremony, Far Rockaway, Queens, November 12, 2006

When did you first begin experimenting with interventions in public space and creating environments for public gathering? What contexts and programs have you worked with?
The Flight 587 memorial was the studio’s first design project for a public space, and the Solar Pavilions followed soon after. Although both had similar site conditions — at the end of a busy street, along the waterfront — they had very different issues to deal with in terms of the public and very different relationships to time, program and the degree of privacy afforded to visitors. A memorial has a very specific program, is meant to be resilient over time and somewhat independent to changes in the neighboring area. The pavilions are temporary structures, which are able to adapt to varying sites and programs.

The pavilions are also conceived as event spaces, public spaces that aim to draw in a lot of people to have a collective experience. The memorial is all about having a private experience within a very public space. The challenge for the memorial was to create such a space of seclusion and contemplation while not turning its back to the neighborhood. The use of a slightly elevated plinth, a grid of trees, and a perforated granite wall served to provide this kind of public sacredness appropriate to a memorial on such a busy site.

Because of the time factor, the circulation diagram naturally seemed to enter our design discussions at different points; the memorial at the beginning, the pavilions at the end. With the memorial wall we began thinking about the role of building units, or blocks, and how individual units relate to the overall structure. The pavilions picked up on this and lead to ideas about flexible assembly systems and efficient part production and material use.

The Solar Pavilions, while they were sites for large events and gatherings, were principally a series of experiments in public participation. They were designed to travel and be continuously redeployed and reconfigured — in a sense mutable structures that could adapt to a range of programs and sites. The design of the pavilions revolved around the development of a kit of parts and a flexible set of rules for assembly that could be communicated to construction teams at each venue. The formal resolution of the pavilions was determined through on-site decisions by everyone involved in the construction. Similarly, with reOrder, the structural armatures could be freely adjusted during the installation and the fabric skin was tailored in situ. The flexibility in the system — in the case of reOrder, the folds of the fabric — remains visible and becomes ornamental artifacts of this approach to design.

For those spaces that are intended for collective experience, how has the context or client influenced the projects? Have you adjusted your approach for a large cultural institution vs. a city park vs. a Miami art fair?
It has been fascinating to see the same work exist in different venues — to watch Solar Pavilion 2, for instance, travel from the rich and complex urban ecosystem of Stuyvesant Cove Park on Manhattan’s East River to the highly refined and demographically bracketed context of the Scope Art Fair in Miami. For the reOrder project we are fortunate to have been commissioned by an institution that combines the best qualities of the city and the museum. The Brooklyn Museum audience feels like a cross section of the borough and, while there is no mistaking the fact that you are in an institutional context, the diversity of constituents that have shown up to see and experience the installation has expanded our notions of what can occur within an art museum context. Broadly speaking, of course the realities of working with a small grassroots organization are very different than the experience of being commissioned by a large cultural institution, but we like to think it has not changed the nature of the work itself very much.

From the April 2010 summary of findings on the death of Bassem Ibrahim Abu Rahma, Bil’in.

Tell us about some of the non-design applications — forensic analysis, geosciences, etc. — of your fabrication work and research.
I don’t know if I’d call them “non-design.” These are projects that brush up against, and often transgress, the limits of the discipline of architecture. Something which might seem completely unrelated at one point might become the crux of a project later. It is always interesting for us to see where the fruits of interdisciplinary collaboration re-emerge in our work. Collaborations with geologists over the past few years, for example, have given rise to alternative approaches within our practice to the management of large bodies of spatial data as well as strategies for the accessing, visualizing and dissecting of topographic information.

Likewise, for work being produced as part of a report for a legal context (the forensic work you refer to), an approach to visualization and the communication of nuanced spatial ideas are developed with an entirely different set of objectives and audience than we are accustomed to within the architectural community.

What’s next?
We’re currently working on two large spatial visualization projects. One is in collaboration with the architect and historian Eyal Weizman, titled “Forensics Architecture.” The project consists of several case studies where we compile and render spatial information for evaluation in human rights cases being tried in international courts. The second project involves developing a process for digital modeling fossils with Adam Maloof, a geologist and professor at Princeton University’s Department of Geosciences. The project began with processing a series of sections of a 640 million year old petrified reef. The fossils appear to be sponge organisms, and may be some of the oldest animal life forms ever discovered.

Digital reconstruction of Trezona Fossil

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All images courtesy of Situ Studio.

CRUISE SHIPS TO PLUG-IN AT RED HOOK
The New York Times City Room reports that the Queen Mary 2 and other large ships will be required to plug in to giant electrical sockets in the Brooklyn Cruise Terminal starting in 2012. This marks a major win for the residents of Red Hook, who have been fighting to stop air and water pollution caused by standing vessels. The power used for the ships will be provided by the City and the New York Power Authority in what Mayor Bloomberg calls “Shore Power,” a product of negotiations spanning more than two years. Seth W. Pinksy, President of the NYC Economic Development Corporation, one of the agencies involved, said that the environmental benefits of the new program “will be the equivalent of removing 5,000 cars per year from the road annually.”
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Before and After look at Times Square Pedestrian Plaza | Image nymag.com

TIMES SQUARE AIR QUALITY IMPROVED FROM PEDESTRIAN PLAZA
A new Health Department report was released this week documenting information from the New York City Community Air Survey (NYCCAS), a comprehensive survey of street-level air quality in the five boroughs created as part of PlaNYC. The report shows that since the installation of the pedestrian friendly areas in Times Square air quality has skyrocketed and “concentrations of traffic-related pollutants were substantially lower than measurements from the year before and were less than in other midtown locations.”
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SPRING IN THE CITY
In the spirit of spring, check out New Yorkers for Parks’ 2011 Blooming Map, a charming resource to find where daffodils are blooming in over 55 parks across the New York. On a not-so-cheery note, plant diversity is down this year, with only 778 of the once 1,357 native plant species in New York City still in existence. See some of the most beautiful specimens we’ve lost here.
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La Monte Young’s Dreamhouse | Photo: Marian Zazeela, © 1993, Mela Foundation

DREAMHOUSE
We’ve recently been introduced to the work of artist/composer La Monte Young, considered by many to be the first minimalist composer of all time, and Dreamhouse, his curious spatial installation in Tribeca. Presented in conjunction with the Mela Foundation, Dreamhouse is open to the public Thursday, Friday and Saturdays from 2pm to midnight. Once arriving at a quiet residential entrance, the installation space on the second floor reveals a fully-carpeted, neon-lit environment guaranteed to leave an impression. The experience is magical and mysterious — an encompassing light and sound environment, womb-like and filled with surprisingly soothing white noise and light. Its a spatial and sensory experience to discover — check it out for yourself at 275 Church Street between Franklin St & White St.
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Burple Bup rendering by Bittertang

BITTERTANG ON GOVERNORS ISLAND
2010 Architectural League Prize winners Bittertang have been selected to build the 2011 City of Dreams Pavilion. Their winning design will be constructed and on exhibition on Governors Island this June. The contest asked designers to “imagine a socially and ecologically-sustainable public meeting space” to which Bittertang responded with Burble Bup. Their playful and sustainable pavilion combines materials like soil and grass with a colorful inflatable roof, anticipating that the inflatables will be recycled as pool toys around NYC following their use on the Island this summer.
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EVENTS AND TO-DOs:
For Talking Books: Aerotropolis, Greg Lindsay will sit down for a conversation with Andrew Blum to discuss his new book Aerotropolis: The Way We’ll Live Next. The book explores how air travel and transportation have affected the shape and scope of globalization (the good and the ugly). This installment of the League’s Talking Books series promises to be of particular interest to Omnibus readers. Wednesday, April 20, 7:00pm at the McNally Jackson Bookstore, 52 Prince St. For more info, see here.

AIANY is presenting Architecture on the Brink at Cooper Union’s Great Hall. Ed Mazria, architect, energy expert and CEO of Architecture 2030, will talk about climate change, regional adaptation strategies and the role of the building sector in both creating and alleviating many of the crises plaguing us today. Wednesday, April 20, 6:30-8pm at the Great Hall of Cooper Union, 7 E. 7th St.

SUPERFRONT and 3rd Ward are lauching their Archi-Film Mashup with a kick-off event on Saturday. This will be the first of a three-part series of screenings, lectures and workshops investigating the cross-breeding of architecture and mass media. Mashup 1 presenters include John Szot of Brooklyn Digital Foundry, Evan Tribus of p*g5ive, and Richard Joon Yoo of h-a-h-a.us. Saturday, April 16, 4:30pm screening & presentations, 5:30pm workshop. 3rd Ward, 195 Morgan Avenue, Brooklyn.

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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.

Click on any image to launch a slideshow of images of the Floating Pool. | Photo © Philippe Baumann

Ann Buttenwieser drew her inspiration for the Floating Pool from the public baths that dotted New York City’s waterfront in the 19th century, and then projected that vision into a contemporary amenity for underserved communities. After years of planning and development, in 1999 she found an equally enthusiastic partner in Jonathan Kirschenfeld, whose interest in waterfront use had led him to design a (yet-unrealized) 600-seat floating theater. Design of the project continued until 2004, when Kent Merrill, the naval architect working with Buttenwieser and Kirschenfeld, located a decommissioned river barge for sale in Louisiana. Shipyard construction on the Floating Pool began in Amelia, Louisiana in 2005, and after narrowly avoiding devastating damage from Hurricane Katrina, the barge made its 10-day trip to Pier 2 in Brooklyn in October 2006. The Pool docked there for retrofitting and final design until its opening on July 4, 2007 at Brooklyn Bridge Park. In 2008, the pool moved on to Barretto Point Park in the South Bronx, the only community district in New York without access to a public pool, where it will return for the next two summers.

Interview with Ann Buttenwieser, The Neptune Foundation
Founder of the Floating Pool

What was the initial concept for the floating pool?
In 1870, Boss Tweed, under the Public Works Department, created five floating pools. There was even a captain in charge. Each summer there was a parade – it was an event! – when the captain led a pool flotilla from the Bronx down to the sites for the opening. Then around the turn of the century, when we had five borough presidents all of a sudden, the pools were turned over from the Public Works Department to the Borough Presidents’ offices. By 1915 there were fifteen pools, with bottoms open to the river water, and slats to keep people from falling out. People felt that there were health benefits from being in the salt air and swimming in the salt water. You got better, you felt better.

Milstein Division, The New York Public Library

© Jonathan Kirschenfeld Associates

© Corey Phelps

© Jonathan Kirschenfeld Associates

© Jonathan Kirschenfeld

© Jonathan Kirschenfeld

© Chris Sedita

These “floating baths,” as they were called, were placed around the city in the tenement areas — the Lower East Side, Hell’s Kitchen, the South Bronx, some areas of Brooklyn, I think there was one in the German district [in Yorkville]. They were created to provide a place for people without running water in their homes to be cleansed. They were pontoon structures — they floated on top of the water like a catamaran. The baths were completely enclosed by a rectangular structure that held dressing rooms. They were not anchored, they were attached to existing piers — recreation piers, commercial piers. They were stored in the winter in the Bronx at Classon Point, which, curiously, is around the bend from where the floating pool was this past summer in the South Bronx. It was as if it came home.

In 1915, the Health Department tested the hygiene of the river water in the floating pools. They put dye in a sewer on the Lower East Side and it came out in one of the pools at Battery Park, and turned the water pink! So they promptly closed the pools down. They retrofitted five of the pools, put a solid bottom in them and then filled them with city water now flowing from the Croton aqueduct. I have no idea what happened to the remaining pools. At some point, I’m not sure when exactly, all were taken over by the Parks Department. When Robert Moses was running the Parks Department, he took the last three that were still running and put them outside of Riverside Park when he was building the West Side Highway. It was sort of a sop to the community that was not able to get access to the waterfront.

The point of this was to reconnect New Yorkers with the water and the fact that they lived on an island city. … They could see the land, feel the water, and see the water.When did you decide to bring floating pools back to New York?
I was working at the city’s Economic Development Corporation, helping people like Roland Betts get his Chelsea Piers project started, and generally trying to help people get through the system. Jonathan Kirschenfeld called and said he had this idea for a floating theater, and asked where he had to go to get permits and such. I talked him through that, he got all the permits and secured a space down at Battery Park but he wasn’t able to raise the money to actually build it.

Meanwhile, in 1980, I wrote an Op-Ed piece for The New York Times about the floating baths. They printed it on Memorial Day with a Jacob Riis picture of one. I figured if the Times thinks this a good idea then it should be done. So from 1980 to 2000 — I was working on waterfront projects, in the Parks Department, and with the EDC throughout that time — whenever I went to a community meeting or a meeting about the waterfront and everybody was talking about putting up an amphitheater (amphitheaters were de rigeur in waterfront design at the time), I said, “How about a floating pool?” Wherever I went, I talked about this crazy idea of mine. It was motherhood. So when I was working at the Parks Department I convinced their Concessions Office to issue an RFP for a floating pool alongside park property. But the RFP was written in a way so that it would be financially impossible to do it. No developer bid on it.

In 2000, I quit my last job and decided to build the floating pool. The first thing I had to do was to get a charter for a not-for-profit, the Neptune Foundation, which enabled me to start raising money. Kent Barwick got me a grant to do a feasibility study, which required collaboration with an architect. Kent suggested Jonathan Kirschenfeld, and I thought – Oh my God, he’s back!

So Jonathan did the feasibility study and I started raising money. We hired a naval architect, because we were now dealing with something that was outside of Jonathan’s expertise, and they worked together.

We figured it was going to cost $250,000 to buy a used barge. By the time we got drawings and were ready to purchase, the price of barges was just horrendous — the cheapest we could find was a million dollars. (I think that this was before we had drawings. We just set out to see what the cost would be.) So the naval architect and Jonathan sat down to plan how to build one from scratch, assuming the cost wouldn’t be higher than the purchase costs cited. We pursued that for six months or so, but when we went out to bid on steel, the building booms in China and New York had begun, so the price of steel had skyrocketed. We discovered that the cost of building a barge would be two million dollars, so we went back to the drawing board and it just so happened that a lot of barges had been dumped on the market because single hull vessels were no longer allowed in commerce. We were finally able to buy one for $250,000.

© Timothy Schenck

Did you want elements of the design of this pool to echo the 19th century baths in any way, or was the inspiration in concept only?
No, I did not want it to echo the floating baths because I had actually gone to Paris to see the Piscine Delunay (which I’m not sure exists anymore, I think it may have been rebuilt). It was a similar concept, with the pool in the middle and with the dressing rooms around it so you were entirely enclosed and you didn’t see you were on the water. You could have been anywhere. The point of Neptune’s pool was to reconnect New Yorkers with the water and the fact that they lived on an island city. We wanted it to be as open as possible, so people could be in the water in the water, so to speak, and be able to see out and understand that there was a view behind them. They could see the land, feel the water, and see the water.

How did the design reflect issues of site selection and infrastructural requirements?
The problem in New York is that despite the fact that everything is on the water, there is no such thing as connections to the upland. We were very lucky in Brooklyn because we went to the old Brooklyn piers and they all had electricity and sanitation and water connections we could hook up to. But other locations posed real problems. For example, Hudson River Park has a historic wall, which you are not allowed to penetrate. The infrastructure just isn’t there, beyond some electric wires now on the piers for lighting. In the Bronx we were very fortunate because the Department of Environmental Protection needed to expand its waste treatment plant, which required mitigation, so they paid for putting in the infrastructure for the pool.

What kinds of jurisdictional issues did you have to battle with?
If I hadn’t worked for the city for so many years I couldn’t have done it. There’s no question. The New York State Department of Environmental Conservation said the pool was a structure, and therefore we had to get a permit from them. They fined the Neptune Foundation $20,000 for being in Brooklyn in 2007. On the other hand the Coast Guard said we were a vessel and thus required certification from them. When we were in Brooklyn I had to get a permit from the Empire State Development Corporation to be there, and then establish an agreement with the Brooklyn Bridge Park Conservancy for them to run the pool. It went on and on and on. There were also insurance issues — noone had created insurance policies for floating pools before, so all kinds of questions were raised about kids falling overboard and such. The Parks Department still feels that Jonathan didn’t put the fences up high enough.

Are there more floating pools coming in the future?
I would love to do more. I do not have the ability to raise any more money – that’s the problem. I’m just hoping that the folks in Brooklyn will decide that they would like to have one as part of Brooklyn Bridge Park. There is such a wonderful community there and they are dying to have that pool come back.

© Kent Merrill

What is next for the existing pool?
It is going back to New Jersey for the winter, because the DEC permit requires it to leave New York State, but it will return next summer to the South Bronx. The permit is for three years there and is renewable. But what the city will decide to do then, I don’t know — there might be demand someplace else. (The pool was given to the city as a gift in June.)

Do you plan on being involved in future site selection, after these three years in the Bronx?
Oh I hope so.

There has been a lot of attention paid recently to the waterfront, whether for leisure uses, greenways, public art installations, private development, etc. You have watched this evolution throughout your career. What are your thoughts on the direction of such developments? Do you see this increased attention as a direct result of the hard work of people like yourself?
Yes, people like me, and people like Kent Barwick who dedicated extraordinary amounts of time and effort to the cause while at the Waterfront Alliance. Mine was more of an area-by-area approach and his was really a regional approach. But we both fought tooth and nail to get things going. Difficult issues arise endlessly on the waterfront. What should be there? Should it be housing? Should it be parks? How are you going to pay for the parks?

But I believe the turning point was when Governor Pataki finally put money into Hudson River Park. That was after an awful lot of pressure from the environmentalists,  the “parkies.” Once Hudson River Park was under way, I continued to work my way south. I was working for the Downtown Alliance to do a master plan for the Lower Manhattan waterfront so we could connect Hudson River Park, Battery Park, Battery Park City, and then up the east side to the Manhattan Bridge. Again, this is all motherhood for me. And I must mention Dan Doctoroff. One of his big projects was to unify everything that is going on between Brooklyn, the Brooklyn waterfront, Governors Island, and then Staten Island, and making it into a harbor park. Yes, the attention is there, and it strikes me as odd when I come across people who are against it all now.

You have spoken in the past about how, if we can clean up our waterways enough, amenities like the Floating Pool will not be necessary in the future. What are your thoughts on the ability of temporary space to condition the public to see a space as what it could be, and to be a catalyst for action and change?
I think that the pool is really a catalyst for the demand to find some way to clean up parts of these waters. The DEC permit requires the Parks Department and the City, I guess the DEP, to clean up a piece of the Bronx River so that people can actually swim in it. If the pool hadn’t been stationed there, then the DEC wouldn’t have required that.

I don’t know if you realize this, but the pool was located between a waste treatment plant and fertilizer plant. Treated waste from the former gets sent to the latter plant to get turned into fertilizer. The smells there can be pretty obnoxious. This summer, because the pool was there and the park is there, the community finally got together and, I believe with the NRDC, brought a lawsuit against the city and fertilizer plant to abate the smells. The pool was a catalyst for that. It allowed them to say to the City: You have given us this wonderful thing. Now make it usable.

© Philippe Baumann

© Philippe Baumann

Click on any image to launch a slideshow of images of the Floating Pool. | Photo © Gary Smith

© Jonathan Kirschenfeld Associates

© Jonathan Kirschenfeld Associates

Ann Buttenwieser drew her inspiration for the Floating Pool from the public baths that dotted New York City’s waterfront in the 19th century, and then projected that vision into a contemporary amenity for underserved communities. After years of planning and development, in 1999 she found an equally enthusiastic partner in Jonathan Kirschenfeld, whose interest in waterfront use had led him to design a (yet-unrealized) 600-seat floating theater. Design of the project continued until 2004, when Kent Merrill, the naval architect working with Buttenwieser and Kirschenfeld, located a decommissioned river barge for sale in Louisiana. Shipyard construction on the Floating Pool began in Amelia, Louisiana in 2005, and after narrowly avoiding devastating damage from Hurricane Katrina, the barge made its 10-day trip to Pier 2 in Brooklyn in October 2006. The Pool docked there for retrofitting and final design until its opening on July 4, 2007 at Brooklyn Bridge Park. In 2008, the pool moved on to Barretto Point Park in the South Bronx, the only community district in New York without access to a public pool, where it will return for the next two summers.

Jonathan Kirschenfeld
Design Architect of the Floating Pool

How did the Floating Pool get started?
It started a little before 1999. Early on in my practice, I had more time to take my imagination to places it wouldn’t otherwise go. I started working on another floating project, a floating theater, learning what it was like to try to do a project without a client. I went around to community boards to ask for their support, I applied for grants. And during this process, I met a wonderful woman named Ann Buttenwieser, who was running the Parks Council, was very interested in waterfront issues, and was very supportive of an innovative project like this. But after two or three years I put it on the shelf for a little while. A couple years later, I got a phone call from Ann Buttenwieser. She said, “I loved the theater but I have been dreaming of making a floating swimming pool, would you be interested?” I had never worked on a pool before, but what does that matter? I said “Of course, let’s get started!”

That must have required a distinct approach to your research.
I was pretty familiar with regulatory, city and approving agencies. I learned early on that this was going to be a very difficult project to categorize. Was it a boat or was it a building? Who regulates: the Coast Guard or the building department? Of course, it ends up being both.

At the beginning, we were talking about making the pool something that was self contained, off the grid, fully powered by sun and wind, something that you did not need to plug in to land-based utilities. Given the budget, however, we decided to do a basic version first. There were a lot of issues aside from the very difficult one of how to take a rusting, 260-foot long, steel barge that used to haul cargo up and down the Mississippi and completely restructure it to hold a pool, a mechanical area and a whole series of structures that included a snack bar, changing rooms, bathrooms, a manager’s office, a reception area, and a staff room. We ended up cutting a huge rectangle out of the deck and dropping it down – after cutting through some very large trusses – to what is now the pool bottom. We had to buff out a series of attachments on the deck, but you’ll see, if you look carefully, circles, triangles, and little remnants that ultimately highlight the history of this barge.

© Doug Cabot

© Brad Kelly

© Gary Smith

© Stefan Danicich

© Jonathan Kirschenfeld

© Jonathan Kirschenfeld

In the basic version, the not quite off the grid version, what infrastructure does it tap into when docked?
Each summer the barge was going to be at different waterfront area enabling folks to have an instant amenity. One of the issues with siting the barge had to do with the infrastructural cost involved in mooring it in any one place for just one summer. To spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to bring a water line, a sewer line, and an electrical line to the pool that is going to be there for two months is, in a sense, contradictory to its desired effect.

The pleasure of the temporary is in the idea of the circus coming to town … it has all the elements of great architecture and great theater.

We’re in the process now of talking to a variety of stakeholders and funders to do a version that is completely off the grid. We’d like to be working with manufacturers who see this as a demonstration project for new technologies in the environmentally progressive world.

What was the construction process?
We completed 60% of the construction in a New Orleans shipyard — mostly the steel work and the yard specific tasks. The rest was kind of standard architectural construction, which we knew would be more effectively and economically done in New York.

Initially it was going to be a spud-moored barge, which is what you typically see, where you have a spud collar and a piling driven into the river bottom and the barge moves up and down with the tide but doesn’t move laterally. But it was very expensive and we couldn’t find the spuds in time, so we decided on a system of six anchors, which turned out to be much less costly and still very effective. For the three months that the pool was at Brooklyn Bridge Park there was very little movement on deck, it seemed stable as a rock.

We started the ten-day process of pulling the barge up from New Orleans without knowing where it was going to go. It was a little risky. We had not received permission from the Department of Environmental Conservation yet, which was a major piece of the approval puzzle. After an intense three month period of time, filled with meetings every week with the State, the City, the Department of Parks and Recreation, the architects, the engineers, and many, many lawyers, it was decided in March of 2007 that the pool would open by July 4th in between Piers 4 and 5, where Brooklyn Bridge Park would be, to introduce this incredible amenity to the community at large. It was a huge gamble, but we had a tremendous group of motivated people and great government officials supporting us.

It was sort of like preparing for a dinner party. You are never quite ready but at a certain point you just sweep unfinished things under the rug and welcome your guests. So we swept a little of the debris underneath the table, where no one could see, and watched the place fill with kids for the first time in the seven year saga of the pool.

© Philippe Baumann

© Timothy Schenck

© Timothy Schenck

© Timothy Schenck

© Karl Jensen

How was Barretto Point chosen as the next site?
Ann’s intention, and the mission of the Neptune Foundation, was always to give the pool as a gift to New York City, so it was the Department of Parks and Recreation that needed to site it in a place that they thought was most effective. Hunts Point is the only community board in all five boroughs that does not have public pool, so they really focused on that community. They had just finished a beautiful park, Barretto Point Park, and spent a few months with the NYSDEC working out a long term permitting agreement.

It was moved at five in the morning in a beautiful mysterious fog up into Barretto Point Park and moored off a beautiful grassy knoll. So now, instead of taking a gangway from what was essentially a large parking area, you walk through the park and up the 90 foot-long gangways onto the pool, where you look onto quite an interesting urban waterfront. It’s not quite the Brooklyn Bridge and the Statue of Liberty and Lower Manhattan, but it is equally arresting. The pool has been a tremendous success up there and my understanding is that it will stay there for several years. The last count showed, I think, a typical crowd of 1,200 kids a day.

The exigencies of working in the public sector and having to deal with the costs of doing an innovative temporary structure like this involves having to evolve the idea over time. One of the most fascinating things about the project is that it can move. While the pool, for now, is in the Bronx, either this version or another version will be a peripatetic project, where its arrival is awaited and its departure mourned. That’s what excites me ultimately about the temporary nature – it has more the quality of life than something built with brick and mortar.

Ultimately we like to see the pool as a Trojan Horse, which gets people really excited about the waterfront. Ostensibly, this could push the political process forward, prompting local community groups to advocate for more access to the waterfront, for better water.

When you are trying something new it is very difficult for people to believe in it until it is physically there. With the floating pool, the only way that people were finally convinced that this was a real thing and that it needed to open was because we dragged it up from New Orleans.

A lot of these ideas have the spirit of kids putting a carnival together in the backyard. It’s meant to be so low tech and so imaginable — all you have to do is stack some boxes and put up some curtains and that’s enough to create a space that reminds of one being in La Scala. For me, that’s the pleasure of the temporary and of using materials that are common or readily available. You can create something that seems much richer and more evocative of buildings but with materials that are still meant to be suggestive of a temporality, of something that doesn’t always exist, that isn’t there forever. The pleasure of the temporary is in the idea of the circus coming to town, setting up the tents, providing this amazing new world and then skipping out and leaving; it has all the elements of great architecture and great theater. But until you build it folks have a really hard time believing it can be done.

Seven years later the pool is built and now we are starting to get a tremendous amount of enthusiasm, but it took a very long series of efforts and obstacles and tremendous amount of persistence on the part of the design team, on the part of the client, the Neptune Foundation, to make it real. These urban issues are the reason I am an architect and live in New York City — playing with the incredibly vibrant line between public and private, how you do it, how you make things feel alive, how you create urban spaces that are an active part of the city, where unexpected things happen. That is what gets me up in the morning.

© Philippe Baumann