This exercise helped identify the inner workings of a space that embraced risk within its given site. This imaginary space embraces risk by flooding itself on purpose, forcing people of different backgrounds and religions into the same focal point, and leaving itself open and vulnerable to the outside world.
The project brief outlined our site as an existing building that neighbored the Hudson Yards development. Our initial site research included defining which kinds of risks specifically affected the design and placement of architecture in the area. The three main areas of risks we found were environmental, financial, and terroristic. We expressed these findings through an abstract site model depicting a red flood and molten buildings. In its reflection, a Utopian version of itself where all risks are out of site and out of mind. This was the first time we realized the disconnect between the real world and the risk world.
Using the spatial concepts found in the inner world and previous research we began redefining the form and shape of the existing building we were tasked with re-inhabiting. We did so by 3D modeling our ideas, laser cutting their profiles to build models, and then slicing them in half with a band saw to better understand their sectional qualities. Through this process of iteration, we arrived at a final massing design that embodied a variety of spaces we found necessary to the concept.
Void Diagram
Neighborhood Axon
The identity of the Hudson Yards development and the surrounding area is deeply defined by the way it mitigates risk. It’s initial investment came as a response to the 2008 world financial crisis. Super rich investors from around the globe came together looking for a safe place to put their money. They used private real estate investment as a means to limit the risk of losing their money in the recession. Over time, the area has been defined by many other responses to outside dangers. Today, one of the biggest risks associated with living and working in New York City and Manhattan is the rising sea level due to climate change. The Hudson Yards development found its way to suppressing this looming hazard by building itself on top of pre-existing train tracks beneath it. Flood simulation studies show the vast majority of buildings in the development will be able to elude the rising water because most of it will flow beneath them. The events of 9/11 changed the way the world used security and surveillance in no place more than New York City. Hudson Yards uses front desks, lobbies, and pay walls to separate their occupants from the dangers that terrorism poses.
We centered our research around literature like A Risk Society by Ulrich Bech and Designing Risk by Jonathan Massey. From these readings, we found that responses to risk often create barriers (both physical and metaphysical) that split an individual’s perception of the world in which they live into two pieces. Reality and a false understanding of the real world. The world which they risk to live in is forgotten or perceived as being impossible or unlikely. This barrier is usually implemented by the use of money. We argue that the real risk of something can never truly be quantified and that barriers created by risk mitigation serve as dampers on the potential outcomes of situations that involve someone taking a risk. As our research on the topic concluded, we began to view risk as something that has the ability to yield a reaction that decides the best, worst, and every other possible outcome of a given situation in the context.
Given this understanding, we set out to find the true potential of a residential space in the Hudson Yards area by designing a space that embodied the potential of the area. We knew that the only way we could do so would be by fully embracing and accepting relevant risks that pertained to the project. The main risk which we focused our design around was something we define as social combustion. We placed socially and financially diverse people in a single place with minimal privacy from each other or the outside world. An obvious potential outcome of this decision would be conflict rising between people because of their differences and anxieties related to the risks they each pose to each other. The equal and opposite outcome of this situation is a strengthened community that takes advantage of its diversity to better itself as a whole and is brought together by common experiences. A community that is freed from the social barriers created by risk mitigation techniques that is able to return itself to the freedoms of a more disordered and less rule stringent environment.