TERRITORIAL TRANSGRESSIONS

AWARDS

Thesis Prize Jury - Honorable Mention (2019) - Syracuse University

Design Awards, Silver (2019) - Architecture Categories / Landmarks, Symbolic Structures, Memorials, Public - International Design Awards

Design Awards, Bronze (2019) - Architecture Categories / Mix - Use Architectural Designs - International Design Awards

Problem - New Jersey has succumbed to planning practices based on the false urban and rural divide, leading to an automotive dependent state of both high density and high sprawl. The need for “urban design” has been relegated to the urban, the neighboring cities of New York Philadelphia, relinquishing a focus on public space, streetscapes, public program, and connective infrastructure in the state. This emphasis has been replaced by a focus on the market in the form of the home ownership and car ownership paradigm that has created a disjointed network within the territory, one that serves the people less than the market, one that is marked by a purveyance of ineffective and dilapidated infrastructural systems. The problem reaches to a critique by Herbert Marcuse, summarized in the statement that any decision made in isolation will create an absurd outcome, or one step further, that rational decisions made in isolation create an irrational whole. New Jersey is emblematic of a broader problem of planning without understanding territory, that the whole is simply not considered. The parts are looked at independently; the towns of the state are planned and adjusted by rational market based decisions that create closed infrastructural systems, disjointed neighborhoods, no cohesive statewide transit, and in short a confused combination of introspective networks. New Jersey is in this way an object exemplary of plan-as-you-go outlooks linked directly to the market economy and the false distinction between urban and rural.

Contention - Understanding the operation of a territory as opposed to conceiving solely of urban and non-urban/rural areas illuminates the underlying flaws present in the built environment that are caused by this assumption. Infrastructure is a vital component of planning that is significantly downplayed and disjointed when looking at areas independently, and as such should be linked back into a proper understanding of the territory.

Objective - This thesis seeks to provide an example of a possible territorial reconfiguration in New Jersey that utilizes an updated conception of territory, creating a holistic proposal to remedy outdated planning and infrastructural practices that serve the market economy at cost to the region as a whole.

TERRITORIAL TRANSGRESSIONS - New norms that transgress the existing conditions and planning of the area, to adjust the built environment so that its function at each scale is in line with how the area should function within the territory. These are seen at each of the project’s scales:

TERRITORY

Norm: A disjointed network of introspective nodes serving isolated needs.

Transgression: A linear city centered on high speed railways that densifies the state along the key city to city connection that it currently serves.

BLOCK

Norm: The proliferation of ladders and closed systems.

Transgression: The use of the grid as an open system and the re-appropriation of ladders for networks of goods, not people.

BUILDING

Norm: The transit hub as a gateway to the city.

Transgression: The transit hub as a functional object derived from the overlapping forces of the area.