Undergraduate Studio: Freshkills Competition
Critic: Fred Pearsall
Partner: Patrick Di Rito
Windfleet
We find at Freshkills a windswept landscape of big skies & uncanny constructs whose isolation & not-yet-connected socio-ecological systems provide unique challenges & opportunities, making our question how to develop heightened connectivity & perception of its ground-to-sky ecologies across space-time scales.
This proposal works across scales to connect the imaginations & bodies of participants to Freshkills’ diverse spatio-temporal ‘horizons’ with site-specific interrelationships waiting to be discovered between those of its extended human & natural ecosystems, & its histories & futures.
The Approach
Prelude. WINDFLEET operates as a socio-historic progression of the New York paradigm. The construction boom of the ‘20s brought about the skyscraper as a new vertical horizon. The frontier exploded with the post-war space-race. Energy consumption becomes the global conflict of the 21st century. The high-altitude wind harvesters propose a new horizon of energy production. They provide both a physical & figurative flicker of light in the smog-filled cities of today’s fossil energy production. The helium-filled wind turbines of WINDFLEET propose a new global dynamic of power production, redefining New York as again the forerunner.
The Site. Years of reinforcing the boundaries of the landfill have left the site especially isolated. WINDFLEET operates as a shifting space-time construct, breaking down socially conditioned & physically reinforced boundaries. At the scale of the Manhattan skyline the white points of light form a cloud on the horizon, instigating a visual inquiry & establishing curiosity in place of animosity. The extending radial-array-grid, projecting past the physical barriers of the site, operate to connect the neighborhoods, once victims of social refuse, become portals of Freshkill’s rebirth as a park. The projection from one earthen mound to the next establishes a unified landscape, punctured only by the kayakers & ducks that operate at the fulcrum of the occluded horizons.
The Imagination
The massive skies of Freshkills are indicative of one of the most wind rich regions in the United States. The constantly shifting Jet-streams dancing invisibly above the site have been estimated to contain within them over ten times the energy the world currently consumes per year.
The turbines operate by counterbalancing the electrical generation mechanism with helium, creating a fantastical combination of the buoyancy of the hot air balloon or the dirigible with the efficacy of a turbine.
By combining lobed mixers: a concept appropriated from high performance jet engines, & stators: a stationary pre-vortex mixer from the biological precedent of flagellum; the sky-ship toggles the cutting edge with the absolutely primitive. The basal qualities of the delicately floating orb counterbalance the highly technical specifications.
The fleet operates in unison, dancing as one, tethered both to the ground & to each to create a network, a shifting cloud. They flex & move about the fixed air-ground poles, orienting themselves towards the optimal wind direction, shifting up or down vertically with seasonal shifts in wind patterns. This system provides sufficient flexibility to service individual units as necessary, or allow the entire fleet to be docked in the most severe weather conditions.
The translucent balloons, constructed of a lightweight laminated nylon shell, glow with shifting conditions of thermochromism. The turbine’s bioluminescent illuminations shift in colour across time. Higher energy production, created by stronger wind conditions, triggers a stronger illumination.
The 37 sky-ships, produce 14.9 MW per month, enough electricity to power approximately 1600 to 2200 homes.
The Immersion
Horizontally, WINDFLEET awaits the sinking topography of the landfill mounds & the rising waters of the eastern seaboard to an elevationally aligned moment in the future. The project accepts the devolving ecological conditions & opportunistically maps the rising tides, instilling curiosity across disjointed visits of larger time scales.
The massive anchoring counterweights are precast concrete with a recycled aggregate (at cumulative load of 60 lbs/cu ft), lightening both the physical & metaphorical load on the landscape. Requiring minimal site work, the inverted sky-piles sit gently on the landscape, diffused their weight across a horizontal support beam (staying under the 500 lbs/sq ft ground requirement) to counterweight updrafts.
At the boundary condition, the opposing fields house a higher density of anchors which then gradient out into an untouched center. This center creates a quiet place in the park where the participant can sense the peripheral containment of the energy harvesting & read the gateway framing the Manhattan skyline in one direction & the Confluence in the other.
The acoustical reverberations on the concrete act to magnify the slight shifts of the sky poles, allowing for both an ocular framing of the sky & an acoustical mapping of the slow processional dance of the wind patterns above.
The Investigation
The 215 concrete sky-piles are arranged in a radial pattern with two portals on the western neighborhood side & three on the eastern mall side.
As the anchors gradient towards the center, their heights shorten, their radii widen, & the oculi-like angle of their inverted cone become increasingly shallow, more conducive to laying & sky-gazing. The scaling piles become occupiable along the order of the imposed radial-grid, & the viewing reveals on axis open up to allow physical access.
The participant, wandering through the site, experiences the cross-section ecological bands of the master plan, magnifying the richness of occupancy, promoting a higher density of both plant & animal life. The botanist & the birdwatcher investigate the same space-times at different focal depths.
Progressing from the periphery to the central core, the occluding horizon of the berm suddenly collapses into the distant horizon of the first mound. The linear progressions from the single point of entry project into the horizon of the hill itself, collapses as the hill forms the boundary of vision.
The framed stems draw the eye down towards the anchoring base. The arrangement of the anchors focuses on diffusing the periphery condition, beckoning the local pedestrian through the perceived arrayed alignments that are uniformly distinguishable only at the entrance ways.
From the expansive suburban fabric the shopper or resident has a compressed view towards the horizon forcing the projection into compression, lessening the perceived distance & drawing them in. Once engrossed within, the boundaries exceed normal perception, delaying the return to reality; the exiting of the dream sequence.
Future Horizons
From the high-altitude turbine, brought down through the connecting stem, & anchored by the oculi to a truly contemporary site, humanity is confronted with a physical & mental moment of conflict: the effects of consumerism on ecological systems. At the pivotal null point between these conditions, WINDFLEET creates a quiet space of contemplation of this dialectical relationship of socio-ecosystems, manifest in physical entities. The participant reaches out & touches the manifestation of conflict, the gently swaying tensioned bridge of ideals, & comes to imagine, with heart & mind, the potentials of brave new horizons.
Team: Patrick DiRito & Professor Fred Pearsall
