The plan creates a place that is at once porous and buffered. Although easy access to the pathways and buildings of the residential community will be partially restricted and vehicles will be highly controlled, the design left open the possibility for movement across the site for people on foot. This is a place at once too large and too urban to completely restrict outsiders and major means of pedestrian circulation across the site have been established.
However, because of the preponderance of unsympathetic uses currently on the periphery, a green filter all the way around the site, engaging the existing canal on the east and providing wide swaths of planting as visual, physical, and acoustic barriers on other sides has been created. To the north and south, it is suggested that commercial, recreational, public and green uses be emphasized.
The studio also proposed an architecture that is hoped will make this site not simply a beautiful, practical, and enjoyable place but a true design landmark. The buildings we have proposed are dramatic and highly variegated in size and individual texture, a range that will give this place an authentically urban feel. In the chance of further development of this project, it will be pursued additional strategies for creating variety and difference, including subtle modulations of texture and shape to conduce a sense of neighborhood and individuality within the larger project as well as a very careful regime of landscaping and the addition of community, commercial, recreational, artistic, and other exceptional elements.
Credits: Michael Sorkin,
Makoto Okazaki, Luoyi Yin, Yanqing Sun
The Michael Sorkin Studio has, for over thirty years, been devoted to both practical and theoretical projects at all scales with a special interest in the city and in green architecture. Recent projects including planning and design for a highly sustainable 5000-unit community in Penang, Malaysia, master planning for Hamburg, Viesselhoevede, Leipzig, and Schwerin, Germany, planning for a Palestinian capital in East Jerusalem, campus planning at the University of Chicago and CCNY, studies of the Manhattan and Brooklyn waterfronts, housing and community design in Far Rockaway, Vienna, Miami, and Mangalore, urban design for the Zha Bei district of Shanghai and a seafront town on the Black Sea in Turkey. The Studio is the receipient of numerous awards.
The studio also proposed an architecture that is hoped will make this site not simply a beautiful, practical, and enjoyable place but a true design landmark. The buildings we have proposed are dramatic and highly variegated in size and individual texture, a range that will give this place an authentically urban feel. In the chance of further development of this project, it will be pursued additional strategies for creating variety and difference, including subtle modulations of texture and shape to conduce a sense of neighborhood and individuality within the larger project as well as a very careful regime of landscaping and the addition of community, commercial, recreational, artistic, and other exceptional elements.
Credits: Michael Sorkin,
Makoto Okazaki, Luoyi Yin, Yanqing Sun
The Michael Sorkin Studio has, for over thirty years, been devoted to both practical and theoretical projects at all scales with a special interest in the city and in green architecture. Recent projects including planning and design for a highly sustainable 5000-unit community in Penang, Malaysia, master planning for Hamburg, Viesselhoevede, Leipzig, and Schwerin, Germany, planning for a Palestinian capital in East Jerusalem, campus planning at the University of Chicago and CCNY, studies of the Manhattan and Brooklyn waterfronts, housing and community design in Far Rockaway, Vienna, Miami, and Mangalore, urban design for the Zha Bei district of Shanghai and a seafront town on the Black Sea in Turkey. The Studio is the receipient of numerous awards.
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