Siyu Zhu
M. Arch Thesis
Harvard GSD
Advised by Mohsen Mostafavi
Fall 2023
01 venues of the everyday
02 transitive gestures
03 Pier 40: until further notice
04 James J. Walker Park: work in progress
05 living structures at play
Transitive gestures describe the direct linkage between a space as outcome and the action as process through a physical form. In the case of mining
Scaffolds, alongside fences, nets, and other utility props, outlast the most enduring buildings in New York City. These
everyday structures embody a unique state of perpetual transience
This thesis examines architecture as devices
01 venues of the everyday
Parks and streets are venues for promenades in a city, which in Benjamin’s sense, or in terms of de Certeau as the “art of doing”, are places where basic activities such as walking, playing, jogging, and spectating take place.
These basic acitivities are essentially playful acts enacted on this urban stage set of the everyday.
The interventions take place in two parks on the Lower West Side of Manhattan: Pier 40 at Hudson River Park, and James J. Walker Park in Greenwich Village. They are two of many blanks in the urban fabric of New York City. Unlike historical European capitals, parks, instead of plazas, are primary public open spaces for leisure.
Located just 1000 feet apart, Pier 40 stands as a colossal structure floating on the river, while James J. Walker Park is a recessed void within a dense urban context.
Pier 40, as drawn here on the left-hand side, houses a parking garage on its periphery, a 400 ft by 400 ft sports field at the center, and several smaller courts on its roof deck.
James J. Walker Park comprises multiple outdoor recreational facilities, including a pool, handball alleys, a playground, a baseball field, a bocce court, and a park.
While both are vibrant sports venues now, they have each undergone several adaptations historically:
Pier 40 was constructed in 1962 as a passenger and cargo terminal for Holland America Marine Line. Its ground floor was dedicated to cargo operations, with the central courtyard utilized for loading 300 trucks. Its second floor was used for taxis picking up passengers from the terminal. The structure was later acquired by Hudson River Park in 1998, and the central sports field was built as an interim solution in 2005.
The area of now James J Walker Park was once a burial ground in the 17th Century. The land was acquired by the Park Department in 1895, later renovated in 1972 into a sports park. The open structure of Pier 40 interiorizes a piece of city, while the caged void of James J. Walker Park performs as an urban room in its neighborhood.
At the present moment, both sites are subject to delayed reconstruction and indefinite renovation as their structures deteriorate and their facilities grow out of date due to a general lack of financial support. This situation leaves them suspended in a stagnated moment of minor or major deconstruction, in which the interventions take place.
02 transitive gestures
In both parks, the spatial constellations are organized around sports fields of various kinds. Hence the interventions concern how the architecture regulates the fields as well as how the fields regulate the movement of human bodies.
Fields, courts, pitches, and ranges are in themselves
architecture in the language of marks, measures, distances, and boundaries. They are physical manifestations of invisible rules that designate specific actions implemented by the human body.
The act of marking, therefore, can be understood as the realization of a set of spatial relations.
An example of a device for action is the ramp at Carpenter Center, which brings pedestrians in close proximity to the interior by facilitating the act of walking and bypassing.
Likewise, activities such as walking, sitting, talking, and watching are regulated by seemingly mundane elements such as benches and fences. In both of
these cases, a physical form is understood as the mechanism through which an action happens. An idea leading to the rediscovery of the sites as transitive gestures.
The seemingly redundant tautology points to the reciprocity between action and form.
These spatial devices form a catalog of kit-of-part that constitutes the intervention. Instead of being understood as literal tectonics, they are thought of and integrated as regulatory techniques that bring forth new relations between activities and space.
03 Pier 40: until further notice
When read from above, the roof of Pier 40 consists of surfaces and marks. Specifically, there are two kinds of marks coexisting at present: Marks that regulate the movement and stoppage of vehicles; And marks that regulate the movement of human bodies.
Back in the 50s when Pier 40 was still a cargo terminal, it bore two scales of marks that indicated parking spots for cars at its periphery and for trucks at the center. It was an infrastructure made for machines purely.
The repurpose in 2005 couldn’t have been made more simple. Only through repaving and repainting partially the ground, was a new life made possible.
As Pier 40 awaits its long overdue rebuild, I propose to excavate the existing structure through partial disassembly. This “temporary” yet indefinite state will kick off its disassembly process in preparation for a complete rebuild.
The disassembly nevertheless follows found traces of the original assembly. The 800 ft by 800 ft structure was built in 8 pieces, leaving visible marks as expansion joints, gaps between fences, double columns, girders, etc. Moreover, the pier was built with pre-topped double-tee slabs and girder system. Every element was trucked, hoisted, and assembled on site.
The excavation would simply be the reverse of the assembly process. Starting from the expansion joints, slabs, girders, and columns are removed one after another to create new spaces.
As the disassembly begins, cargo ships arrive and dock at the pier; They bring the disassembled elements away as the process goes on; When the excavation nears its end, paving and painting works start. Finally, the new is born out of the old. It is an architecture made of marks on the ground and nets as enclosures.
The roof is repaved and repainted with new marks. As the structure was originally designed for trucks, its floor heights allow for sports like basketball to occupy the interior of the second floor.
Each court starts to measure the existing structure and the distance between columns, then fits itself in almost automatically.
On the ground floor, the excavation brings extra light into the rather deep free plan. It reads as an open field, an extension of Hudson River Park superimposed with a grid of pilotis, with minimal amenity rooms enclosed. A jogging track takes a detour into the structure, with park benches populated on the sides of the sports court. The structure is now a park.
Rusted hangars are replaced by new fences that trace the original height of those steel components. They not only create necessary divisions between sports courts but also produce the building’s new appearance together with enclosure netting.
The new is made with nothing other than fences, marks, nets, and the process of removal. As the old claddings are replaced by nettings, the porous open structure is now integrated with the waterfront park and urban activities that were excluded formerly.
04 James J. Walker Park: work in progress
James J. Walker Park is constellated by segmented pieces. A sports field, a park, a playground, a series of handball alleys, and a swimming pool, all separated not only by fences, but also by rises and drops across the entire site.
A seasonal sheltering structure is proposed to substitute the fences separating the handball alleys from the park. As the old fence goes away, the ground is repaved with steps bridging the 4 ft drop in-between, forming a new passage within the park.
The intervention starts with the excavation of the ground and removal of the old fence, followed by the installation of precast concrete footings; CLT props are erected on top; The stepping scaffold comes into shape as the decks get installed; Finally, fences and nets are installed via and onto the same structure.
In summer, the assemblage is an integrated theatrical device for activities taking place in the park: a cage for playing handball, lamp posts for the pool at night, and spectator decks for the field.
The wooden structure is a scaffold that builds and un-builds itself. The interlocked relation between structure and surface, posts and nets, is formalized both through the geometry and its self-building process, where one becomes the means of realizing another.
In winter, the cage is disassembled. The handball alleys merge into the park as an extension to its adjacent playground, leaving traces of the assembly behind. The wall awaits the ball till the next festive moment.
The CLT structure is scaled modestly to obtain the effect of a theatrical prop. It creates a place for the local community to convene for sports events as well as other types of performances and events, as the seasonal disassembly allows for the handball alleys to be interpreted and occupied by other forms of play.
05 living structures at play
Despite the shared syntax, the interventions of Peir 40 and James J. Walker Park each take on a process of excavation and integration in response to their distinctive context, which respectively resulted in the form of a ruin and a shed.
Temporally, the excavation of Pier 40 is a one-way process of removing and diminishing the original structure. The ruination turns the piece of architecture into a mere multi-level landscape with slabs and posts; The assembly and reassembly of the
handball cage at James J Walker Park is contrarily a planned loop of structure and non-structure with itself as a means of construction, reinforcing its nature as a performative prop facilitating social interactions related to play.
In terms of urban scale performance, the excavated pier dissolves, and integrates into the constellation of 33 piers along the Hudson River. It now caters
to the larger public of Manhattan Island, meanwhile continuing to host youth league sports events. On the other hand, the integrated James J. Walker Park serves as the recreational center for the adjacent school and neighborhood.
The thesis is hence akin to what Van Eyck famously acclaimed in House is City and City is House: A city is not a city unless it is also a huge house- a house is a house only if it is also a tiny city.
Everyday structures relate to the cycle and recycle of architecture in New York City in the form of synecdoche: They are verbs that constitute a system
where a part has the totality of the whole and the whole exists in every found part of itself.
The old and the new share the same syntax derived from action, and in turn exert actions that operate across various scales from the object to the building to the city.
Transitive gestures speak to a language of architecture stripped bare. It proposes to leverage ordinary techniques of spatial regulation as a means to engage reality, to mediate the relation between people and space, constants and incidents. It is an architecture that enables conditions in which everyday life takes place, and is in turn given forms through such enabling.