live_work_water is an urban scale prototype
that floats in a sea of blue

New York, New York, US
01 bridge
Program_ existing waterfront activities  

Water is perceived as a foreign topography that New York City and many cities have not adopted as a method that can be achieved in which a sustainable design can be deployed from.  Family New York's +Plus Pool project draws promising speculation to a future where patrons can live on a soft landscape known as water. With the city rapidly flourishing in population, the proposed critique on Pier 40 at Hudson River Park, is fabricated to rethink the existing waterfront that allows an expansion for the growing metropolis. 

Rotterdam, Netherlands, EU
01 floater
Program_ residential

Netherlands is one of the many cities easily configured of canals and which port cities like Rotterdam, have adapted to ways of coping with the utmost downpours and sporadic water patterns. With approximately 60% of the country living below sea level, Rotterdam's Floating Homes exist in its clear depiction of comparable advances in its sensible design on water.  The sister pier to New York's Pier 40, Wilhelminapier in Rotterdam, falls short in its ability to blur the harsh boundaries between the hard/soft_scape. In a critique, Wilhelminapier is modernized as a prototype that can fulfill the needs of the locale. 

hi, welcome to New York

With New York City being surrounded predominantly by a mass body of water, the gnarly currents are temperamental and erratic. Using an iteration of a bridge to simply control the flow of water in which allows a buffer zone between the hard/soft_scape to be created. The bridge fosters a 'regular' landscape that is defined as the living quarter between New York's existing waterfront and the imaginative esplanade itself.  This sector becomes the new landscape in which such scheme can be intervened on. As a ecological barricade, the bridge accommodates a porous facade that sanctions excess water to be filtered out as well as multi-platforms (for boat docking) that shift +/- meters in elevation, determined by the magnitude of rainwater. In its easy displacement of the shoreline, the programs on the new embankment are perpetual to those that live on NYC's existing water front, where Pier 40 is rejuvenated as a continuation of New York City's (framework of) zoning districts. And the floaters? They bring you from A to B.

hoi, welkom in Rotterdam

In the segregated canals of Rotterdam, districts are isolated based on their functionality in which restrains the city's full potential to grow. By attaining a live-work-play type of turf, the craft of a floater welcomes the idea of a commodity that can be modified in its shape or size based on the needs of the community. Unlike New York, the water in the Netherlands is fixed and stable on account of their solution in assimilating a sea lock. Yet, the water in Rotterdam is eminently polluted due to the undeviating marine traffic. The archetype design of the bridge is reiterated as a filtration system endorsing healthy water between the coves...where all can jump in and go for a swim. More, the floater is prorated in wedges in its pursuit as a residential development; the wedges are constructed as petite boats that are easily deployed or single-family unit and multi-unit/co. 

f16_ 3 weeks design
Professor, Angie Co of Studio Co Architecture_New York,NY
design collaboration with Benjamin Darby