Scales of operation in the waterfront: the Brooklyn Navy Yard Studio
By Enrique Martinez | Nov 07, 2012The studio is focusing on the Brooklyn Navy Yard (BNY), a 300-acre area on the Brooklyn waterfront right across from lower Manhattan. The history of the BNY,since its early beginnings as a shipbuilding facility for the US Navy in the early 1800s, has always been linked to New York’s economic development. Through periods of great prosperity and rapid decline, the Yard has always reinvented itself and has remained an area of significant importance for Brooklyn and the region.
Today, there are a number of plans and initiatives to transform the site in different ways. Under the Brooklyn Navy Yard Development Corporation, it will become a model project of an innovation hub for new industry in New York City. This site has been supported by the current Mayor and other local political figures as one of the keystone elements for local and regional economic development and the testing and evaluation of new sustainable practices.
Architecture Department on risd.edu
Hand Meets Machine Mar 01, 2013
For the 70 first-year graduate and undergraduate students required to take the fall 2012 course Architectural Projection, the first assignment couldn’t have been more straightforward. Draw a still life from a fixed point of view, using any medium – charcoal, pencil, paint. What came next, explains Professor Christopher Bardt BArch 83, was a far less obvious assignment, but one that gets at the essence of architectural practice: moving visual information between the page and the object in a systematic, measurable way.
Reconnecting Providence
Jan 31, 2013
In July 2011, Rhode Island Governor Lincoln Chafee signed a bill that set the stage for a major transformation of the cityscape in downtown Providence. The I-195 Commission Bill cleared the way for naming a group to oversee the redevelopment of nearly 40 acres of land freed up by the relocation of the I-195 highway. The project marks a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to restore what was once a vital, cohesive area between downtown and the city’s Jewelry District. But there’s just one problem, says Professor Emeritus Friedrich St. Florian: Of the seven members serving on the I-195 Commission, not one is an architect...
Reimagining the Industrial Waterfront
Dec 03, 2012
Graduate students enrolled in Scales of Operation in the Waterfront have big ideas for the Brooklyn Navy Yard. In the fall studio taught by Senior Critic Enrique Martinez MID 98, students are envisioning fantastical ways to reinvent the 300-acre site that was once America’s leading naval shipyard.Though the site has been transformed into a modern industrial park, a large portion is abandoned. Once the naval yard’s military operations ceased in 1966, many of the facilities that had been used to construct US battleships quietly fell into ruin. “It’s a ghost place in some areas,” Martinez explains. “The piers are in decay...