Following our site visit to Congo Street Initiative in Dallas, the Bruner Foundation team headed to New York City to our next 2013 Rudy Bruner Award finalist site, Via Verde. Submitted by Jonathan Rose Companies and Phipps Houses, Via Verde (the “Green Way”) is a 222-unit affordable housing development in the Melrose section of the South Bronx. The project, completed in 2012, was designed as a model for healthy and sustainable urban living.

View of Via Verde from fourth floor fruit tree orchard.  Photograph: ©David Sundberg/Esto

We spent two cold, windy days on site, touring the project with the design and development team, taking photographs, as well as meeting with people involved in its development, design, and operation in the Bronx and Manhattan. Like the Congo Street Initiative, Via Verde illustrates another approach to designing affordable, sustainable housing, albeit at a larger scale and catalyzed by a different set of circumstances.

Via Verde grew out of two international design competitions that were part of the New Housing New York (NHNY) Legacy Project, which sought to create a new standard for affordable housing and development. The first, the 2004 NHNY Design Ideas Competition, was sponsored by AIA New York (AIANY) in partnership with New York City Council and the City University of New York and solicited design concepts for three sites. Powerhouse: New Housing New York, an exhibit and public programming supported by the National Endowment for the Arts, showcased selected entries at AIANY’s Center for Architecture. Read more…

In our blog, From Field to Park, we discussed the post-tagging process for trees and transporting them to a project site. Here, we turn our attention to property lines and their importance to a project’s success.

It is not often that property lines are tangible, constructed elements visible at the boundary of every plot of land or building lot. More often, we find that these critical legal delineations—represented by a linear arrangement of one long and two short dashes on surveys or within drawing files—are not easily identified in situ. They can be like the mosquito buzzing in your ear. You never see it, but then feel the bite. An error in siting this legal boundary correctly in the field or on drawings can quickly escalate from minor drafting revisions to major design changes or worse. Inherently an American privilege, property ownership is measured in fractions of an inch. As designers, we must be aware of what that fraction may cost if not properly documented.

A misconception when reviewing design drawings? The belief that a contract limit line, natural features like streams or ridgelines, or built elements such as perimeter fences or building facades are what demarcate the edge of the property. It’s imperative that at the start of a project, the true property line—and not an arbitrary edge—is identified. An assessment of edge conditions should be part of the initial site analysis to determine if future design elements will impact this relationship.

Credit: Mathews Nielsen

We used a red balloon to represent a proposed sculpture to assess sight lines at our West Point Foundry Preserve project. The designers studied the views from within the property as well the view into the property from adjacent lots to the project site. Views are not confined by property lines and must be considered from all angles.

There can be several oversights at the property perimeter. These are often discovered in later, more costly stages of a project and frequently occur when the initial assessment was not comprehensive or when insufficient data was available for a site. Some typical lapses include subterranean footings for buildings or structures that extend beyond the property line, misdirected overland drainage flows that will either unnecessarily enter or unlawfully exit the site, or the construction of a barrier (wall, fence, screen, etc.) that is improperly located on the adjacent property. While a site element and its foundation may be positioned properly, we must also consider the excavation of and any necessary shoring for foundations that may extend beyond the property line.

Read more…

Aerial shot of the South Bronx. The Hunts Point peninsula is dotted with warehouses and distribution centers reflecting varied industrial uses along the waterfront, with a small residential pocket at the upland core.
Photo credit: Hunts Point Vision Plan

Hunts Point Landing in the South Bronx, our latest project, was described by Michael Kimmelman in the New York Times, “River of Hope in the Bronx” this July. It is the fourth in our 20-project South Bronx Greenway master plan, conceived in 2006 to reclaim portions of the borough’s industrial waterfront by transforming brownfields into greenways and park space and providing public access to the river for the first time in 60 years.

Greenway routes and destinations from the South Bronx Greenway Master Plan (2006).
Photo credit: Mathews Nielsen Landscape Architects/NYC Economic Development Corporation

The Hunts Point peninsula, loosely bounded by the elevated Bruckner Expressway and ground level rail lines, is a relatively isolated locale. It is laden with massive food distribution operations, oil depots, waste-handling operations, scrap metal dealers, auto salvage yards, a sewage treatment plant, a prison, and a small mixed-use residential community. Our park is located at the former terminus point of Farragut Street at the Long Island Sound, wedged between a food distribution center and a City of New York Department of Sanitation (DSNY) salt shed.

Clearly, the site’s constrained size presented considerable design challenges. In addition to these, our Green Team was also faced with an additional quandary—what to do about massive amounts of contaminated soil from a coal gasification plant that used to occupy the site? To meet our goal of restoring the degraded shoreline to a functioning tidal marsh and to treat all of the site’s stormwater in a biofiltration pond, we knew we had to excavate it. But the disposal of that much fill would have been very expensive. Trucking, lack of available receiving facilities, and disposal fees would have quickly added up to a large sum.

Material excavated from the shoreline (right) was stockpiled on site and dewatered prior to placement and fine grading of the upland berm.
Photo credit: Mathews Nielsen Landscape Architects

Read more…

Kimmelman in Berlin

Michael Kimmelman seems to have entered his new post as the architectural critic at The New York Times with the same wonderment-flecked eyes you can spot on first-year students climbing Rudolph Hall’s steps each fall. As a musician, trained art historian, and cultural journalist embarking on an architectural education, his position is not so far removed from the mixed bag of students he addressed at the Yale School of Architecture recently. (He was speaking to the first professional degree students from backgrounds as diverse as biochemistry and anthropology.) Like the students whose very diversity is that which makes them valuable contributors to collegiate conversation, Kimmelman will have to hold on to his unique position even as he navigates a new field. And like the critic confesses, perhaps students should “hope to ask some stupid questions.”

Read more…