Yale School of Architecture | Fall 2018
Advanced Studio | Peter Eisenman
Critic: Anthony Gagliardi
Partner: Winston Yuen
New Haven Oak Street Connector Redevelopment as Debilitation of Formal Model
Theodor W. Adorno’s Ohne Leitbild was an argument on conducting art and design “without a model”. It was a criticism of both the abuse of intuitive artistic creation and the totalization of prescribed methodologies. This studio borrows from Ohne Leitbild to challenge urban models from the past, examining them on the urban site of New Haven, and debilitate them with the site’s actuality.
The project site is an interstitial space between the famous New Haven nine-square and the Hill neighborhood, flanked by the Union Station train yard and the urban debris of 20th century modernist architetures, and cut apart by the Oak Street connector. Students studied and applied various urban strategies on the site to form a critical stance towards both the urban models and the city. This led to projects with “weakened models”, as vehicles for a discourse on urban theory. In this specific project, O.M.Ungers’ Lichterfelde project was selected as the driving model.
Model: O.M.Ungers, Lichterfelde
Model Analysis
Iterations
Model Application & Debilitation
In deploying the protocol of Lichterfelde on the New Haven site, debilitations were carried out as a fourfold:
a). Using the site to deform the framework, instead of imposing an idealized organizational order.
b). Using church street as the spine to achieve cohesion between context and the project, instead of privileging its internal cohesion.
c). shifting the cell placement (the grids), allowing them to blend into the context, but nonetheless keeping their own identity.
d). Redefining the function of the spine and ribs as per the actuality of site conditions, thereby transposing the formal idea of the spine and rib into the organization of circulations on the urban site.
Site Axon
Ground Floor Plan
Plan & Axon Zoom-in
Zoom-in Axon
Physical Model