THE DENSIFICATION OF WEST BRONX
PUBLIC-PRIVATE DEVELOPMENT | BRONX, NY
Yale School Of Architecture | Spring 2020 | 12 Weeks
Instructor: Anthony Acciavatti
In Collaboration With Ian Gu, Justin Kong
FAR Diagram
Today, the approximately 125,000 cars that pass through the Bronx New York each day create an enormous amount of pollution damaging the quality of life for the residents. And the public housing authorities of New York are already struggling to hold on, as NYCHA estimates, it requires over 32 billion dollars over the next five years to just upkeep the current stock of housing. Congested with traffic, these large infrastructural thoroughfares are major sound and noise polluters of the Bronx, especially in this case the Major Deegan. Consequently, the dominating presence of the Major Deegan has forced the West Bronx to take on the scale of a car-driven community. However, the West Bronx has one of the lowest percentages of car ownership in all of the five boroughs rivaling downtown Manhattan.
With the intention to increase housing affordability and access to much-needed social amenities and infrastructures in the Bronx community, we are proposing a new mixed-use urban model that combines the innovations made in Sao Paulo’s SESCs complexes with much-needed housing across the underdeveloped sites. By decommissioning the Major Deegan Expressway, which currently separates the West Bronx from the Harlem River, we can acquire the publicly-owned FAR to incentivize new public-private development projects inland. As a result, we can offer a new purely public waterfront twice the size of Central Park, whilst bolstering existing infrastructural hubs in the Bronx.
A 21ST CENTURY TYPE OF SOCIAL INFRASTRUCTURE
By Decommissioning the Major Deegan Expressway, which currently separates the West Bronx from the Harlem River, we can acquire the publicly-owned FAR to incentivize new public-private development projects inland. As a result, we can offer a new purely public waterfront twice the size of Central Park, whilst bolstering existing infrastructural hubs in the Bronx. This allows a cash-strapped government to have agency in negotiating with developers in terms of incentivizing favorable developments that benefit the community. Thus, this project proposes to transfer this FAR inland, bolstering existing infrastructure and densifying West Bronx. This project incorporates the SESC typology, a nonprofit hub designed to provide members of any commerce association with wellness, recreational and cultural facilities. These functions are easily accessible by the public while some are reserved for members of the commerce association. This project ties together the dynamic nature of the Sao Paulo SESC with much-needed housing infrastructure for the Bronx.
PUBLIC SPATIALITY: A NEW PUBLIC GROUND
This project proposes a new mixed-use urban model that combines the innovations made in Sao Paulo’s SESC complexes with much-needed housing across the underdeveloped sites in the Bronx. As a first pilot project, the site is situated beside the Fordham subway station, a current vacant parking lot. While the current neighborhood is already relatively dense, the public amenities are scattered and underdeveloped, namely a lack of daycare, access to fresh food and recreation, as well as a lack of affordable social housing. Spanning the length of the whole block, we focused on creating a mid-block connection on the ground floor to denote the public ground and create access to a local food hall and supermarket space below ground. Two residential components are created allowing a mix of affordable and market-rate housing. These hug the recreational space in the center.
Central Atrium
INTERWOVEN PROGRAMS: A NEW RECREATION TYPOLOGY
Through lifting the ground plane we negotiate the level difference of the site while opening up the food hall and market space in the sunken plaza. This also allows for the mid-block connection. The use of heavy trusses allows the center recreation spaces to hang and feel light and expansive while transferring it to a heavier facade expression that relates more closely to the context of the neighborhood character. The public ground plane is defined by the base of the atrium space, serving as a new spatial condition nestled away in the middle of the block. The recreational space functions as a lifted mass in the center of our building where a large atrium and skylights illuminate the space. The changing shape of the atrium allows for the accommodation of a variety of programs creating a visual connection while maintaining a physical separation allowing for the coexisting of active programs and more static ones in one space.
Recreational Space
A NEW LIVING TYPOLOGY
Zooming back out to our testing ground in the Bronx and the plethora of potential soft sites, the site is ripe for new nodes to be developed through additional public amenities and housing developments. With each development, an organic part of the whole relationship is created where all of the Bronx benefits. In conclusion, this project intends to move away from a traditional deterministic grand strategy for urban development. As such, we hope to rethink the urban development mechanism through the opportunity inherent in the decommissioning of Major Deegan.
