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Beyond the centerline #reimagineparkavenue
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Por Juan Moya

Reinventing Park Avenue

DESCRIPTION OF THE PROJECT Park Avenue´s history reveals a process full of hidden episodes in which public space is shown as an itinerary of very varied landscapes that constitute as a whole its true identity. The exuberance of the Manhattan Island´s... original landscape was extinguished and geometrized by the urban grid of the Commissioners Plan. With the arrival of the railroad, the Fourth Avenue turned into a connection line towards the North, dissectioning the territory and leading to execute afterward an equipped cover with linear vents for the trains steam output. The conversion from steam to electric train power left vents out of use and made possible to transform the avenue into a linear park under urban embellishment new premises. Subsequently the car became a priority, causing the linear park was reduced to an inaccessible fenced median. The latest art manifestations and landscaping initiatives constitute a call to the change, in which people seem to be the main actors of the future in this new public space. The proposal aims to turn on an open process for the contemporary reconstruction of the translucent identity of Park Avenue's historical landscapes, starting from an architecture that is a support for understanding of its varied identities and urban problems discussion through the artistic production and citizen interaction as active and germinating agents of this new hybrid character. Firstly, the process establishes the hierarchy of the different mobility modes, getting more available space for the pedestrians and expanding its area of influence to nearby squares, galleries and POPS (privately owned public space) which will improve the cohesion and urban quality of the surroundings. The currently existing elements in the medians, such as the underground railroads' vents and landscaped areas, are given in value and around them are set up removable prototypes whose structural slenderness borders on imperceptibility. It is an architectural appropiation of air and nature without hurting them in the form of dissolved landscapes that will turn the emptiness into atmospheres in which artistic production will germinate around city issues and identity values. Emptiness architectures are located at the intersections of the streets and the avenue, where the urban grid breathes, reimagining and sewing the urban confluence and the transits. Art emerges in these spaces as a critical instrument within an evocative atmosphere and is dissolved into an universe of heritage values, human manifestations and natural and artificial ecosystems. A successful solution for contemporary public space requires so many factors, interests and disciplines that a closed proposal seems to be, a priori, a poor and inefficient solution according to the heritage wealth and the desires of people who will inhabit it. Landscape architecture should be constituted in a latent state, which provides it with critical and evolution capacities under continuous transdisciplinar discussion. This position will allow to establish alliances between very varied interests which will awake a feeling of belonging in people and will create a multiple identities space. Therefore, the proposal pretends to inject an initial energy through architectures which are perceptively dissolved with air, art, urban landscape and nature, allowing to make visible critical ecosystems related to air, water and soil pollution, energy efficiency, lack of human scale and residential life, and nature reborn. A three-dimensional atmosphere is created floating weightlessly above people helping to blur the harshness of the surrounding urban landscape and bringing awareness of city big issues. Everything is mixed in people minds creating a ‘new sky’, educator of consciences that, at the same time, serves as an infrastructure for artistic and botanical production. INSPIRATION FOR THE PROJECT The proposal is inspired by the way nature appears in front of people and aspires to an architecture that floats, dissolves, is infinite light, energy, air that flows, almost without substance. As the nature itself, germinating slowly and wildly in the small fissures of the hard urban landscape, looking for the sky and the light spreading in the territory through an uncertain live process. The man finds such a pure and essential relation with this new reality that finishes dissolving in itself taking lessons of conscience across the observation of its vital processes. LOCATION The proposal is based on the urban mobility hierarchy and on the strategic situation of removable activator prototypes along Park Avenue. Therefore, the project can be extrapolated to any Park Avenue location. A general organization of the corresponding section between 46th and 57 th St. is proposed and a detailed development at the crossing between 52nd St. and the avenue . MATERIALS Proposed prototypes are a humanized and ethereal interpretation of the skyscraper model, a cartesian exterior geometry that encloses an internal microcosm full of vital mechanisms. They are as artificial living organisms that breath, purify, soften weather and produce energy in a self-sufficient way, making their processes visible. The structure of the prototypes is constituted by a removable three-dimensional pipes system with pressurized water inside which allows a substantial improvement of its resistance to compression efforts, and therefore, greater slenderness. A bioactive exterior coating of titanium dioxide is applied to absorb part of the environmental CO2, as if it were a tree. Perimeter structure works as hydraulic cycle with misters and thermal sensors that allow to cool the interior environment in hot seasons, refreshes the vegetation that grows inside and purifies the atmosphere. Water mist microparticles trap pollutant components in suspension (NOx and SOx) precipitating in the soil in the form of acids. This acid micro-rain is absorbed by a subsoil under the pavement which is rich in calcium carbonate that neutralize the acids and purify them. Part of this clean water, together with the natural rain, is returned to the subsoil and other part is accumulated and reused by the hydraulic system. This same misting system is used to precipitate above the subsoil other stale particles in suspension, so that different phytoremediation plant species take up and regulate these compounds resulting in clean water that is reused by the hydraulic system. In order to give value to the existing vents identity, a hydraulic system is incorporated to carry out a heat energy exchange with the city's steam pipe system. It allows to generate ascending steam clouds and, through environmental thermal sensors, to warm up the environment in cold seasons and serve as a canvas for artistic manifestation. Pavement under prototypes incorporates piezoelectric sensors that take advantage of walking kinetic energy to accumulate it and later, to make use in artistic works or lighting ambient at night using photoelectric sensors. DIMENTIONS Park Avenue´s new section creates more space available for pedestrians and bikes. The space dedicated to vehicles circulation is reduced to two lanes of 12 feet width each one in both directions, being one of them keept for delivery zone scheduled. In return, the proposal liberates a pedestrian central area of 50 feet width and two bike lanes in both directions of 8 feet width each one. Transversal connection between sidewalks and this new central area is improved by adding to the existing crosswalks other new ones, located at midpoints of each block at an approximately distance of 98 feet between them At the crossing between streets and the avenue, the prototypes, with dimensions of 50 x 35 x 150 feet (W x H x D), create a horizontal volume on a human scale that offsets skyscrapers verticality and gigantism. Más

22 Marzo 2018 en 325 Park Ave, New York, NY 10022, EE. UU.

Juan Moya

Publicada en el álbum Reinventing Park Avenue