JUSTIN BANDA

The life of Kanye West is a complex menagerie of contradictions. He is the motherless father, the misogynistic romantic, and a self-proclaimed god searching for a higher power. He is a writer, a celebrity, a rapper, a designer; the Chicagoan living in Tribeca. One of the most prominent architectural enthusiasts in the popular zeitgeist, Kanye’s persona and his work evoke a range of reactions.

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.

Noted on the graphic to the right is the project area, which includes the extents of Gowanus and a small portion of Red Hook in the southwest. Note that the existing lots bordering the Canal were rezoned in the 1940s and 50s to break the residential fabric to make way for indsutry. After the industry’s exodus, the contaminated canal was left behind, creating vast swaths of non- or under-utilized lots.

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.

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.