JUSTIN BANDA

The resulting architectural composition is my attempt at creating layers of information filtered through chaos. By drawing from the inhumanity and violence of the neighborhood’s history as well as the dissonant music of Kanye himself, I attempted to form a sterile framing device— in this case, the resulting obelisk— to process this new landmark and point of reference. From a design standpoint, the building attempts to process multiple nodes and touchstones to form a machine understanding, wrapped around a core of vulnerability.

At the Head of the Canal we created a celebratory water feature bounded by open plazas to commemorate the historic pump station, and to expand the park to better connect to the water. This area is the natural ending of a path of public space along the canal, with close proximity to the highest existing residential density of Gowanus in the public housing towers.

A large portion of Gowanus exists within the IBZ, the Industrial Business Zone. Set up in 2006 in 16 NYC neighborhoods, the IBZ was established to protect manufacturing and industrial jobs citywide. Gowanus is surrounded by six other neighborhoods: Park Slope, Boerum Hill, Carroll Gardens, Red Hook, and Greenwood/South Slope.

Here we can see the effect that applying a form-based code has on Gowanus, both in terms of restoring the torn urban fabric and in terms of creating a comprehensive, sustainable walking path centered around six nodes along the canal. We attempted to incorporate all six of Bridging Gowanus’s goals throughout the plan, incorporating a beautiful riverwalk that jumps the canal in several locations.

There are five MTA stops serving Gowanus, although only one, 9th/Smith, is actually part of the neighborhood. Two nearby western stops serve Carroll Gardens, and two eastern stops serve Park Slope. Gowanus is bounded by Smith Street in the west, 4th Avenue in the east, the I-278 Expressway to the south, and Baltic Street in the north.

We created a transit-oriented development in the biggest stretch of under- or non- utilized land in Gowanus that would support a redeveloped transit station, while aiming to meet the
desire for substantially-increased residential density within Gowanus, by mixing types that provide more affordable workplace housing. This node also contains a new library and school to support the residential load.

Our project site is located in Gowanus, a neighborhood in Brooklyn, New York, which was established surrounding a 1.8 mile long canal which gave the area its name and empties into New York Harbor.

There are three primary sustainability drivers: night-flushing, using a combination of subterranean ventilation mazes and underground thermal mass; a green plaza for gathering and events that takes up roughly 2/3rds of the site, and direct solar orientation and gain tactics that shield the building’s interior from overpowering east and west sunlight.

On the left, you can see the existing zoning conditions within Gowanus, demonstrating New York’s current employment of use-based zoning, which has resulted in the heavily-segregated building types you can see on the right. A negative byproduct of use-based zoning is that it unnaturally mandates lots into specific types without consideration for the urban fabric.