In costly, crowded Manhattan good design is expensive and good projects
are hard to come by. So it's noteworthy that the plan for a waterfront structure
awaiting final approval on Manhattan's Pier 84 was created by and for
youth--and is to be built entirely from donated and found materials.
The project is part of Design Directions, a free program for high school
students at the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum. During a six-week
charrette led by architect Mark Versoza, with the help of Steve Hoffman
(who have both worked at Samuel Mockbee's Rural Studio, in Auburn, Alabama),
eighteen 13- to 18-year-old students designed a community space for Floating
the Apple, a nonprofit waterway awareness organization that, among
other things, teaches kids to build and sail boats on the Hudson. In an
inspired collaboration, the students worked with their clients to translate
Mockbee's model into an urban setting.
At the Rural Studio, Mockbee's Auburn University architecture students live
in the communities for which they build and use materials they gather for
free, like old tires and car windows. Versoza--who now practices at Van
Campen Architects, in Soho--says, "Mockbee teaches architects to gather
a community. They facilitate a barn raising."
Offsite:
Find out more about Floating the Apple,
the organization Urban Alternatives Design Studio students are designing
for, at
www.floatingtheapple.org.
In New York Versoza and Hoffman (an assistant professor at Auburn University)
facilitated a tent raising. First they decided on a tensile structure to
join Floating the Apple's existing buildings and provide a shaded spot for
boat-building. Then Versoza took the Design Directions students out on the
Hudson to look back at the pier. "They saw the space as it would be
seen--from the water. They began thinking like their client, and they began
thinking like designers." Considering the materials available to them--PVC
tent fabric, steel cables, and discarded billboard material--the students
created models for two structures that resemble billowing sails. They also
designed a colorful array of graphics identifying Pier 84 and Floating the
Apple to cover the chain-link fence and storage containers that border the
site. "We wanted it to be writing you could see from different scales:
the water, the street, but also close up," says 17-year-old Nadine
Diaz.
The structure still needs the stamp of approval from the Hudson River Park
Trust, which oversees the pier, before construction can start this summer.
"It will be exciting to see it built," Versoza says, "but
in this case the design process was a feat in itself." Hoffman agrees:
"The imagination can do a lot with a little. We wanted to show the
kids that good design can happen anywhere with anything."
