Imagine New York
Imagine New York spreading its characteristic constructive density throughout the entire city and even more, nothing else could be constructed, no space on the ground or in the air for anything but for what is already in it. Now imagine New York as a plugging grid, from which you could unplug any building or block from its place and re-place it anywhere you want in the grid, a grid provided with all services needed, ready to plug or unplug any autonomous high building and keep it connected to the rest of the city. What if that grid would spread itself into the sea and even into other cities? then New York could be modified as much as we wanted, we could move a building from the center of the city to the middle of the sea like pieces from a puzzle and still be a part of New York. But of course, everything has its balance, the level of water would have to be kept, and whenever a block is moved into the sea, the water which took place there would run into the city throughout the complex plumbing system below NY that graduates water levels, creating a waterfall right where the city was emptied. This water falling from the skies is the same water we are standing on with our intervention; more islands we have, more water and taller cascade with more urban movement.
Bringing a bit of sea into the city and city into the sea, we imagined a system which allows you to pick any building and put it in the sea, like new islands surrounding the area of Manhattan, transforming the space these buildings occupied into urban cascades, with some green growing nearby and new spaces for pedestrians and bikes, being cars completely banned from a saturated ground.
Subways are the key; as these are the link between the existing and the new, our way of seeing the connection to the future. All the metro stations, all the underground routs, the tunnels with no dead end will connect all this new old buildings at open sea.
But, what shall we move, change? Why these buildings and not others? The areas we studied are rich in many ways, the urban traffic, the connection, the access, the diversity of use, like Battery Park and Union Square Park. This means that all big city’s problems are laying here on and under the ground; we are thinking on a new layout for the paradigmatic city. So these new islands we are creating have autonomy but no self sufficiency, that´s why it will be plugged with other, and other, and other and firm land. In the shore two different pieces of urban density are shown like the center of all new beginning. We unplugged the buildings and in its place we are testing a whole new system and way of thinking the growth of the city: from the harbor and underground, through new tunnels and to the river and to the sea.
