JUSTIN BANDA

Development was phased in three parts. The pioneer phase begins seeding residential building types along bridge streets and within a quarter-mile from the 9th/Smith transit stop. The intermediate phase fills in the next-highest density of residential use, while the mature phase fills in final development and public plazas around the head, the crux, and in the lower IBZ.

The Canal was used in the 20th century as an industrial transportation route and dumping ground, creating an ecological disaster that remains one of the U.S.’s most severely contaminated body of water. In 2010, the EPA declared the Canal a superfund site, and cleanup began just this past September. The community is concerned that developers will purchase decontaminated waterfront property to gentrify industrial areas for residential use.

From an architectural standpoint, the other major draw is the site of Fulton Market itself, which has a violent and controversial background. In the composition, I attempted to capture the feeling of sensory overload from the site, by blocking out the city as a whole, then focusing and zooming in on multiple, autonomous points, layers of information filtered through chaos. In much the same way, Kanye’s music is about overload— verbally, lyrically, politically, economically, religiously— so it would seem apropos that his gallery would function the same way. Fulton Market has a recorded history of sensory overload as a meatpacking “hell” or “jungle,” as Upton Sinclair described it in his book “The Jungle,” written about the awful conditions that the site used to have at the turn of the twentieth century.

We introduced a neighborhood-scaled center of Gowanus focused around a neighborhood market surrounded by the densest area of commercial activity, paired with appropriate increases in residential density with the aim of creating a stronger sense of community. This area is the highest existing center of activity in the neighborhood, as it is intersected by half of the streets that bridge the Canal.

At the edge of Gowanus we developed the transit station at 9th/Smith to support the nearby transit-oriented development just north, while also developing the transit station itself as a high-end commercial center to draw business from Manhattan. The east edge of this area continues the reconstruction of the IBZ by seeding tower residential with high-density industrial, and the southern tip functions as a new campus for the Brooklyn-based Metro Tech university.