Thesis, Summer Semester

Following is a short description of my thesis project as it stands currently:

Working title:
"Work-space Leisure"
Working subtitle:
"Manhattanism relearned through tall building deconstruction"





It is essentially a two-tiered project, where a tall building is deconstructed piecemeal (tier one), and its pieces (primarily steel) are reassembled in the same urban context into a new, opportunistic architecture (tier two).



The first half of this semester involved detailed research of deconstruction as well as identifying the ultimate goals. The second half of the semester I am researching precedents involved with large-scale, urban, leisure projects, as well as identifying a building to deconstruct and taking a "material inventory" of that building.



So far, I believe I have narrowed my building search down to one of the three XYZ Buildings, located in the Rockefeller Center halfway between Times Square and Rockefeller Plaza in Manhattan.

The developing idea is to throw two "contradictory" programmatic elements at each other, work-space and leisure. The architecture will stretch from the Rockefeller Plaza to Times Square, all the while providing programs of both work and leisure. Also involved is a reflection on the leisure architecture of the Fun Palace (1960's, unbuilt) and New Babylon (1950's, unbuilt), which hypothesized that in the future automation would liberate us from work, and we could spend all our time in leisure activities. My adaption, obviously, will need to incorprate (and monopolize on) the fact that this has not happened, and that in actuality, work time is growing in the face of automation, and increasingly being merged with leisure time.

Current list of precedents:
High Line, Diller, Scofidio + Renfro
Fun Palace, Cedric Price
New Babylon, Constant Nieuwenhuys
Parc de la Villette, Bernard Tschumi

Current list of research topics/books:
Delirious New York, Rem Koolhaas
S M L XL, Rem Koolhaas
KM3 Excursions on Capacities, MVRDV
Landscape Urbanism Reader, Charles Waldheim
Opportunistic Architecture, LTL
Tower and Office, Iñaki Abalos and Juan Herreros
Readings on Metabolism
Readings on Constructivism