TriBeCa, Manhattan, New York City

This study is Joseph Baisch's Masters of Architecture thesis project with advisor Paul Goldberger at the Parsons School of Design. It examines the relationship between the car and pedestrian in the city through the exploration of a site in TriBeCa where a piece of mono-functional vehicular infrastructure has produced a glitch in the urban fabric.

The space occupied by the Holland Tunnel rotary exit, known as St. John’s Park, is currently given over to the automobile, completely excluding pedestrians. Before the construction of the tunnel in the 1920s, however, the space was designated as an open civic square for the use of surrounding neighborhood.

This thesis aspires to restore the site to the condition of a fully functional piece of the urban fabric, both by unlocking the public space available within St. John’s park and by inserting programmatic elements that tie it to TriBeCa’s adjacent cultural anchors. The project accepts the car as a reality in the city and examines how cars and people can coexist without the complete removal of either from a particular space.

Thesis Advisors: Paul Goldberger and Astrid Lipka

William Perris, Maps of the City of New York, 1852-54

Examining the destinations of Eastbound tunnel traffic, New York State Department of Transportation Data shows almost 40% of cars pass straight through Manhattan to Brooklyn, Queens, and Long Island. 

Analysis of the destination data supports a tactical shift in the traffic pattern that allows through trip cars to merge more directly onto Canal Street and relieve some traffic pressure from the site. 

On a neighborhood scale, by creating a space inaccessible to pedestrians, the Holland Tunnel Exit severs 4 blocks of east-west circulation while north-south circulation is fairly uninterrupted.

A subsequent mapping of desired pedestrian movement starts to reveal the asymmetry of the site produced by York Street dead-ending before reaching Varick. This asymmetry drives a diagonal flow of people across the site to and from the corners on Varick street. 

The project’s network of hardscape paths and bridges promotes connectivity. To clear the cars below and remain accessible, the proposed landscape surface rises gently toward the southeast. Between the main pedestrian flows, the surface is strategically opened, providing light and view for the cars below and allowing the vehicular movement to activate the new urban park above.

To further tie the site back into its urban context, a cultural film center occupies the volume beneath the southeast corner of the landscape. Programmatically, the building picks up on the adjacent TriBeCa Cinema (the current home of the Tribeca Film Festival) and Spring Studios. This structure will serve as the new public hub for the annual TriBeCa film festival and as a civic amenity for the neighborhood.

The building takes on an architectural parti where the exhibition space addresses the new public park, revealing itself above the landscape surface.

The main volume of the film center holds the street corner at Beach and Varick.

The building announces itself as a film center by presenting the theater volumes as sculptural objects visible from the exterior.

“We are now completely accustomed to regard the skeleton structure as a spatial instrument of some power, since it is – after all – some considerable time ago that a formula was evolved permitting the simultaneous appearance of both structural grid and considerable spatial complexity...”

Colin Rowe, “The Chicago Frame”

Drawing on the legacy of two seminal Chicago architectural figures, our design for the Chicago Biennial Lakefront Kiosk brings together Rowe’s theoretical opponents – a Miesian structural frame and a Wrightian structural space.  Per Mies, we have deployed a structural frame to delineate a contained territory, yet one with a free interior. Contra Wright, this outward structure establishes the envelope and a supposed “order”.  But, as a counterweight, an internal series of volumes, made of structural material capable of both supporting itself and of defining space, establishes an architectural interior in simultaneity. 

There is a quasi-tenuous relationship between these two spatializing, static elements. The external frame, made of steel and aluminum, represents the iconography of the modernist project, and acts as both boundary and as structure.  On the interior of this frame sculptural and irregular internal volumes made of panelized cross-laminated timber (CLT) panel, also form a structural enclosure. They have, despite their thin-ness, independent integrity. So on the perimeter and to define an outer boundary we use the modernist frame. Per Wright, we use material itself as spatializing structure. Questions remain, though. Do these two structures support each other? Are they connected or interdependent? Can either element exist in the absence of the other? Is the territory of the pavilion defined by the space of either structure, or only by both working in tandem?

This project is the result of a collaboration with Andy Bernheimer and Max Worrell of Bernheimer Architecture

The project began with an experiential concept, where a visitor, arriving by train, emerges directly onto the coastal landscape.

This conceptual idea is substantiated by Beach 44th Street station’s unique condition within the New York City subway system. On a city-wide scale, it is the location where the elevated subway comes closest to the natural coastline. Even within the Rockaway’s, the station is distinct in its adjacency to a nature preserve—with no buildings between the tracks and the ocean. The intervention celebrates this unique condition by inviting the landscaped surface to the edge of the subway and setting up a specific arrival sequence from the train, to preserve, to the beach beyond.

The ramped platform is embedded within the particular topographic rhythm of the coastal landscape. Formally, it responds to the ground’s periodic undulation that begins underwater in the form of sandbars and slews and continues onshore as a sequence of dunes and swales. This topographic condition combined with saline winds sets up the banded ecotones that define the coastal environment. In response, the preserve center takes on a long, linear parti so that circulation from city to sea reveals this layered landscape, with the building functioning as a node along this passage.

Approaching the building from below the landscape platform, a visitor enters into a pathway that rises toward the preserve center. This concrete “snorkel” features discrete apertures, so that processions through this space is sequentially guided by distinct views toward the sky, the city, and the land. Ascending onto the building's open deck, one is rewarded with a framed view of the land, sea, and sky.

Queens, New York City

On a site scale this building functions as a landscape boundary. Formally, it is a long bar which calibrates the site into zones for approach, amenity, and event. 

As an initial departure, the building addresses the inherent asymmetry of the given site conditions with a diagonal circulation axis that runs from the existing easement to the velodrome finish line. Approaching along this axis the building frames a view of the track, which is heightened when set against the intentionally solid South facade. The approach axis forms a slot through the building, and that passage sets up a spatial compression and release in the final entry sequence to the track. A second axis cuts into the earth and under the building and track providing access to the infield.

The thickened wall, which sets up the gated condition upon entry, wraps the building on three sides. Consequently, the building parti becomes an additive folded metal seating element, wrapped by a solid enclosure. While the depth of the wall is read from the exterior, the interior reveals a system of folded walls supported by a series of structural glu-lam ribs.

Parsons School of Design, M.Arch Studio 4

Instructors: David Lewis, LTL Architects and David White, Right Environments

Greenwich Village, Manhattan, New York City

On an urban scale this addition to the Parsons SCE building, housing studio and exhibition space, addresses the activity of adjacent Union Square and 14th Street. The main circulation access, which cuts diagonally across the site, accepts primary pedestrian circulation from the Union Square Subway, and connects the two streets (13th and University) that bound the corner lot.

The building develops this axis three dimensionally into a daylighting device around which the school is organized. Sculpted vertically, the axis becomes a lightwell that admits direct daylight and forms a six level interior atrium. To the west, the atrium is bounded by a concrete wall that reflects and softens direct light, creating an ambient, glowing light condition for the atrium and adjacent exhibition spaces. This reflector wall sheilds the studio spaces from the glare of direct light. The studios take advantage of diffuse northern light collected by the shallow northern lightwell and the sloping north facade. 

Programmatically, this central atrium divides the school into working studio space and exhibition space. One continually engages this daylit slot when circulating between the these two distinct zones.

Parsons School of Design, M.Arch Studio 3

Instructor: Kimberly Ackert, Ackert Architecture

Two Bridges, Manhattan, New York City

Within the context of New York City Public Housing’s dire need for systemic upgrading, this studio considered the vacant land surrounding the Alfred E. Smith tower blocks on the water’s edge in Manhattan — contested ground in terms of real estate, aesthetics, and environment — as a place of opportunity. 

This aggregated housing, featuring a mix of unit types, explores the slab building typology. As an initial intervention the rectangular bar is bent allowing the building to address South Street while also calibrating the surrounding landscape. Responding to the tenuous nature of land along the waters edge, the slab is raised to accomodate an open air market. With the expressely public nature of the site at ground level, the building voids a layer of space mid-tower for use as an outdoor common element for the residents of the building. As opposed to small, private balconies, this communal terrace, conceived of as a sequence of outdoor rooms, promotes neighborly interaction.

The building is shrouded in an outboard lattice screen which serves both as a shading element, a privacy screen, and a compositional device that unifies the upper and lower appartment bars.

This project is the result of a collaboration with Jo Garst, M.Arch

Parsons School of Design, M.Arch Studio 2

Instructors: Andy Bernheimer, Bernheimer Architecture and David Leven, LEVENBETTS

Published in: Urban Omnibus, Archinect

Redhook, Brooklyn, New York City

This primary school occupies the dynamic intertidal zone that is created by transforming the water’s edge from a hard barrier into a natural marsh. Thickening the area where land meets water results in a more resilient condition to contend with storm surge events.

To inhabit this resulting landscape, the building becomes a slab hovering over the tidal marsh. This scheme allows the marsh, which can be accessed via boardwalk platforms, to slip underneath the building. The slab is strategically cut to bring light down to the ground level platforms and into the interior of the school.

Parsons School of Design, M.Arch Studio 1

Instructor: Bryan Young, Young Projects

The school's facade is faceted to break up the inherent bulkiness of the slab and to allow for a reading of scale. In plan, the panels are rotated to provide varied light and view for the school’s students and teachers. In section, the panels are angled to reflect either ground or sky. Capturing alternating images of sky, water, and marsh, the facade is activated by these more temporal environmental conditions.

Redhook, Brooklyn, New York City

This water collection and remediation urban landscape is designed to collect rainwater runoff from the surrounding streets in three basins depressed below street level. Each basin is designed to forest unique marsh vegetation that over time will bare evidence of the moisture patterns that course through the site.

The basins were depressed based on proximity to major paths of street drainage and the underground Battery Tunnel. During rainstorms, the basins fill with incident precipitation and runoff. As the height of the collected water rises, the pools begin to track climactic variation.

Over time, natural vegetation growth will create a verdant ecosystem, overtaking the rigid contours of the deployed geometry and forming organic hills and wetlands. Visitors can wander from the paths into the basins to explore the various architectural follies that will be periodically exposed or submerged with changes in water level.

This project is the result of a collaboration with Alex Stewart, M.Arch

Parsons School of Design, M.Arch Studio 1

Middlebury, VT + Washington D.C.

The U.S. Department of Energy Solar Decathlon is a biennial, international competition where 20 collegiate teams are charged to design and construct a 1000 square-foot solar-powered house. I was one of three project founders for Team Middlebury College, serving as the Architecture Lead from the project’s inception to the completion of the house on the Middlebury's campus (July 2009-October 2011).

Middlebury’s entry into the competition captures the experiential qualities that define the historic New England farmhouse while remaining a product of its time. With an east-west axis and predominantly south facing glazing, the interior spaces recieve abundant natural daylight and passive solar heat gain. The house utilizes locally-sourced, natural materials that are durable and have minimal embodied energy. Our design accentuates the pure gable form, producing a crisp container that wraps the interior spaces. This form connects our design directly to Vermont vernacular architecture, and is powerful because it is a form universally understood as home.

Published in: Archdaily, AIArchitect, Architect Magazine, Architectural Record, Inhabitat, Metropolis Magazine, Popular Mechanics, The New York Times, The Washington Post

Through the use of a detailed scale model, this week long introductory project for studio 4 analyzes the material and loading properties of the roof structure of the Tiles Hill Reception Center by Amateur Architecture Studio. Following the precedent’s structural logic, the model’s wood members are joined using only pinned connections. The construction of the model revealed that the roof system gains rigidity through the accumulation of this detail. Collaboration with Yuliya Savelyeva.

1:20 Graphite on vellum, 24” x 70”

Alvar Aalto’s house in Helsinki serves as his family’s private home and as Aalto’s Studio. The residential zone of the home is planimetrically complex, while the studio features a primarily sectional solution. Both zones open onto the south-facing garden and roof terrace. With it’s many fireplaces, insulating wall-section, and south-facing living spaces the house is a reaction to the harsh realities of the Finnish climate. When asked how a private house should be placed in relation to a road, Aalto stated that the “road must be a the rear and the facade should face the courtyard.” Aalto’s own house presents a reserved and closed street facade, with the rear facade enclosing intimate outdoor spaces and connecting them to the interior.

1:20 Graphite on vellum, 30” x 48”

Graphite on Vellum

This project began with a fifteen second film clip of the northern lights that subsequently became the found object for representation. The drawing evokes the fluctuations of solidity and transparency that are apparent in the atmospheric quality of the initial video clip. The two-dimensional representation also explores the apparent depth of space that is implied by the gradations of light that form as the northern lights gather and disperse.