ADAPTIVE INFRASTRUCTURE
THE NEW YORK CITY CENTER FOR MATERIAL EXCHANGE | BROOKLYN, NY
Yale School Of Architecture | Fall 2020 | 12 Weeks
Instructor: Marc Tsurumaki, LTL Architects
Individual Work
Productive Uncertainty
The fundamental paradox of uncertainty for a discipline-based on projection, of impermanence for a practice predicated on permanence, will define the studio. This brief asks how the material conditions of architecture might engage with the increasing volatility that characterizes our collective relationship to emergent environmental, climatological, biological, political, and social conditions. Extending beyond the immediate crises, we seek to interrogate architecture’s intersection with notions of adaptability, transformation, resiliency, and productive indeterminacy.
This project focuses on the circular economy of building materials. The New York city center for material exchange intends to create a new urban infrastructural typology, a place for secondhand material storage and processing, to reconsider the potential of the material circular economy. The design also reactivates the Brooklyn waterfront by maximizing public inhabitations. Eventually, this project creates a new way to look into the new york city water edge that is adaptable for future.
Our site is in New York City, a hub for mostly all industries is always considered as the largest consumer of different resources and material, and generates a huge amount of waste every day. In this project, instead of looking at the city as a construction waste generator, this project regards the city as a productional system, a generator of materials. There is a huge amount of demolition and construction activities going on in NYC everyday. As a starting point, the project raises the question what if the building industry no longer follows the traditional material demolition system and takes advantage of the materials that already exist in the buildings?
The early study shows the break down into building types and specific materials that are available in NYC from the demolition of buildings and the potentials if we reuse the material for a second life and how much energy we can save. Instead of transporting the construction waste to the outskirt of NYC, as per its current policy. This project intends to start a testing ground for this new urban typology, provide space and agency for a material reuse system in the city and explore the full potential of the material circular economy, and in this case, the construction and demolition waste can be reduced and instead to be stored and used for upcoming construction.
