Manhattan
Transverse
2022​
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DP Thesis​
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Yarzar Hlaing
Yi-An Zhou
Manhattan’s vertical paradigm is long-overdue for a change as the delirious grids and narrow streets suffer from the extremity of urban density and has failed to keep up with the rapid growth of social and political structures of the 21st century. Urbanism was once mediated by the streets and buildings, but today the dependence on digital systems has enabled people to coexist in different places simultaneously resulting in the urban environment to be less relevant. The finite geography of Manhattan has pushed buildings to grow vertically as single entities within a grid, resulting in lack of shared public programs on the ground level. The public spaces hold significance in civic engagements between the inhabitants of the city leading to ask how static architecture could be renewed and loosened to reinforce intersection between the social and the urban forms that are more aligned to contemporary routines. Therefore, the question becomes whether architecture could exist outside the governed city grids. The constant change and instability of social systems demands an alternative typology of shared spaces where public programs are no longer bounded by zoning laws and property lines.
Manhattan Transverse explores a new architectural paradigm in which forms and envelopes are driven by public circulation and site context. This speculation inverts the civic programs by enabling urban traffic into the existing building envelopes, where the streets morph into civic programs. The site is located in Lower Manhattan Civic Center which is home to public services as well as governmental buildings that remain detached from the urban circulation. The grandiose nature of the state buildings cover the whole city blocks, yet the interior sits empty filled with archives and records that are now digitized. The civic typologies once represented exclusively and status; however their significance today remain unclear as they are costly to maintain. By manipulating the existing buildings to reconnect with the ground, the buildings become part of the streets and no longer act as barriers to the neighborhood. The building enclosures formally and programmatically react to the urban circulation with different spatial opacity and ambiguity to enable new formal and social potential.
Delirious grids and extremity of vertical density has resulted in isolated blocks with generic forms, facades and programs deployed across each district of Manhattan. As society becomes more dependent on digital systems, the locality and premise of urban form has failed to keep pace with the changes in social and political structures of the 21st century. The intersection of urban context and social form is analogous, as the organizations of city blocks dictate how the people occupy the space. However, the sameness of architecture enclosures and geometric city grids have left the urban traffic to be detached from the shared interactions between the public and the private realms.
