Urban design research in Coney Island, NY.
I hope to draw awareness through the urban designers lens to help promote community's individualities along with reintegrating spaces through uncovering the realities in the use of public streets and information to make positive changes on a local scale, the human scale.
I plan to use this book as an introduction to our social fabrications and how we, the people, can change our everyday experiences in the concrete jungle by acknowledging the flaws created by urban planners with the help of their developer friends. The book shows how they have crippled our generational reputation by stating verbal rumors to sabotage and renew culturally rich neighborhoods in our as-built environment. Coney Island in Brooklyn, NY is used as an example of what is dormant in every urban setting.
The book was a accredited studio design class focusing on book making during Covid-19 in 2021. I would make trips for field work taking photos during the off season to have a clear view of what lies on the surface of our social fabrication in our as-built environment and compare the past archival images to current taken images.
Book Design Process
The book's emphasis was placed on organization of information through narrative and sequence, and also mediation of information by established structures using spaces. While going through investigative iterations of visual communication and making are explicitly architectural. I was able to transpose material and spatial conditions from three-dimensional to two-dimensional and to manipulate the elements and principles of book design using speculative representation techniques to produce resources that embodies a specific architectonic condition. The investigations were predicated on the assumptions that architecture can be informed by thinking and making multiple scales, and that the book can serve as a proxy for an architectural provocation capable of conveying value and mediating physical experience.
My position was to use the book as a manifold of artifacts that shed light on Urban Design by virtue of its discourse. I was responsible for the ‘space’ across all spreads with the quantity of information engaging the page, thus building means to communicate chronologically and bibliographically. I decided to use cinematography strategies to communicate the macro elements of urban planning in Coney Island as a silent film and then how it shaped the micro aspects of urban design as image sequences in a film strip captured and organized as a ‘photo album’. The manifesto chosen to investigate was The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs. I used citation to drive the reader in understanding how the psychology of sidewalks and structural effects that give the reputation of neighborhoods.
Book Introduction
The first volume in the book is called Coney Island Parks in 125 Years aka The Funny Face book. It's displayed as a silent film and organized as a historical chronological order starting in 1896 to today. The illustrations represent the characters as chapters that were involved in past time and how they evolved our understanding of Coney Island, continuing the ironic, new age, punny humor. The second volume in the book is called Off the Riegelmann Boardwalk. It’s composed of image sequences like in a film strip organized as a photo album. The chapters are the organically artificial neighborhood zones shown in the images. This volume dives deeper into how we interact with these everyday, mostly seen, activities in urban settings. The approach is to feel the space represented in the sequence as you stroll through the neighborhoods. I was able to direct the reader's eyes by citing prominent urban designers and their lenses of urban enthusiasm.
Ambitions
I'm currently working on a sequel that will be a architectural conceptual proposal on energy interventions using the Circular and Blue Economy methods within my thesis project. I’m using this book to as visual evidence to pave the way to re-imagining our public spaces for diverse and mixed uses.
Cross references:
-The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs
-The Color of Law by Richard Rothstein
-Coney Island Lost and Found by Charles Denson
-The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces by William Whyte
-Garden Cities: To-morrow by Ebenezer Howard
Additional reference that isn’t mentioned in the book:
-Abstraction and Empathy by Wilhelm Worringer
Inspiration - Charlie Chaplin
Volume I
Volume II
This is a 5 minute video summary of the book used for my final presentation.
