TRANSPARENCY AND 
    TRANSPORTATION

VISHAAN CHAKRIBARTI Studio 
DESIGN III
SPRING ‘17 - 7 WEEKS

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Question:

What will cities do with the extensive street spaces when self-driving cars and ride sharing programs reduce the number of vehicles on the road and the needed space for streets?

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Drivers:

Linear Streets, Views and Site Lines, Circulation

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Program:

Commercial Space 
Residential Space 
Educational Space 
Outdoor Space 

Advancements in self driving vehicles and car sharing services indicate an inevitable decline in personal car ownership and vehicle dominated lifestyles.  Currently 26.6% of Manhattan’s 23 square miles is taken up by streets.  This studio begins with the assumption that there will soon be 50% fewer vehicles on the streets of Manhattan, thus returning over 169 million square feet of highly valuable real estate back into the market.  This 50% recoupment of spaces presents a crucial opportunity to re-think the relationship of vehicles and occupiable space in the city.

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This project explores the possibilities and implications of developing a 1-mile portion of Manhattan’s FDR Drive, a 9.44-mile freeway that extends along the east side of New York City, into inhabitable space.  Taking cues from Colin Rowe and Robert Slutzky’s seminal essay, Transparency: Literal and Phenomenal, this structure focuses on the nature of the pedestrian experience and first-person perspective.  Rowe and Slutzky assert that “Transparency may be an inherent quality of substance, as in glass curtain wall; or it may be an inherent quality of organization.”  Utilizing a system of interlocking glass and steel frames that weave along the site, the building depicts literal transparency through material overlaps and phenomenal transparency through the abstraction of spatial grids and intersecting planes.  

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A small kit of parts, individually designed at a human scale, can be amassed to create an endless structure that easily conforms to the linear constraints of streets, while still reacting to the constantly changing street scape.  The final assembly offers an endless variety of programs and interactions to take place within the standardized frames.