Adaptation

Manhattan’s urbanization could very well have taken a different approach or a different sensibility. A sensibility that appropriates and studies existing or given conditions as the framework for its definition. Rather than an engineered exercise in optimization based on ideal efficiencies, Manhattan’s urbanization may have evolved as a negotiation with and adaptation to the existing. Through the analysis of the site in its pre development state as recorded in the 1865 Viele map, the following series of speculative drawings riff off the hypothetical narrative of an alternative Manhattan that emerges out of triggers latent within the site. Topography as well as hydrological processes offer some of the initiating patterns that reorient the simplicity of the cadastral and infrastructural grid into a highly differentiated framework for urban growth.

Project: Adaptation - Manhattan

Year: 2013-2014

Team: Ken Chongsuwat, Peichen Hao, Yujun Yin, Yue Shi, Yingjia Gong

Exhibited: Storefront for Art and Architecture, New York (Past and Present Futures exhibition)

Contributed to: Farshid Moussavi Functionlab