HUDSON YARDS HABITATS

2017.12

LOS ANGELES, CA

CREDITS

Pariya Mohammaditabar [Research, Design, Animation]

Lamice Halaby [Research]

Peter Trummer [Advisor]

Sven Winkler [Technical Assistant Advisor]

SCI-Arc EDGE Design of Cities

TAGS

#Architecture

#Research

#CityDesign

#ConceptArt

#Animation

The Hudson Yards Habitats is a new generic masterplan in the age of hype objects. It is based on the hypothesis that all current master plans are formal hybrids of historical archetypes whose original contents are no longer relevant in present-day. The hyper block reverses this formula in crossbreeding the inherent contents of such historical buildings while losing the signifiers of their forms. BIG’s King West Street project is taken as a case study which is derived from Dutch structuralist precedents; Aldo Van Eyck’s Orphanage House, Piet Blom’s Cube Houses, and Hans Kollhoff’s KNSM Eiland Block.

The block of Habitats is the amalgam of contents rooted in the aforementioned precedents. The result of such synthesis is an uncanny mega block composed of stacked layers of mat buildings each containing autonomous communities of habitats. Orphanage House inspired the idea of mat-building which promotes self-organized communities over society. Cube Houses with elevated access cores resemble tree housings with modular voxels implying the equality of parts and therefore individuals. KNSM represents the typology of the 20th-century urban block which is derived from the socialist city that implies an organization of metropolises of different classes. BoH’s strange realism is the outcome of the fusion of paradoxical contents whose formal signifiers have been dissolved into a new whole.

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The Hudson Yards Habitats is a new generic masterplan in the age of hyperobjects. It is based on the hypothesis that all current master plans are formal hybrids of historical archetypes whose original contents are no longer relevant in present-day. The hyperblock reverses this formula in crossbreeding the inherent contents of such historical buildings while losing the signifiers of their forms.