LAURA LUBNIEWSKI

While working for Tumbleweed Tiny House Company in Colorado Springs, Co, I was the lead designer for two new standard models for the company: the Farallon and the Roanoke which offered some more modern options to our customers.  The project involved a committee of experts from our Sales, Workshop and Build departments. I was responsible for the design from floor plans to wood choice to doorknobs.  I produced the construction document set that our builders built it from.  The final deliverable was two exterior designs (The Farallon and Roanoke) and three floorplans that were interchangable between the Farallon and Roanoke (The Alta, Vista, and Pacific). 

The Farallon Alta was then debued at the National Tiny House Jamboree 2016 where over 50,000 people attended to check out tiny house builders, hear speakers, and learn more about related industries such as solar energy, water collection, and composting.

Tumbleweed designs and builds custom tiny houses on trailers, classified as Recreational Vehicles (RVs) and is and RVIA certified company.

photographs from www.tumbleweedhouses.com

Siting Shrinkage: Comparative Urbanism in Shrinking City                                           

SOURCE: West Berlin, Germany

SUBJECT: Buffalo, NY USA

URBAN DESIGN STRATEGY: The Green Archipelago

The Green Archipelago is an urban design concept used to describe ways urban areas actually function and how they should be conceived. The manifesto was introduced in 1977 by Oswald Mathias Ungers and Rem Koolhaas after a Cornell summer program in Berlin.  This alternative model of urbanism challenged Urban Renewal and instead embraces depopulation in Western cities, imagining them as archipelagos of urban islands in seas of greenery, incorporating nature, agriculture, and infrastructure of contemporary suburbia. The idea is to weed out substandard areas and intensify fragments worth preserving. The substandard parts are left to be reclaimed by nature, while the intensified islands form an archipelago within the green “sea”.

Berlin was used as a testing ground for this alternative model of urbanism.  When the manifesto was written, the Berlin Wall enclosed West Berlin (1961-1989), cutting it off from surrounding East Germany.  Because of these existing political conditions, Berlin needed to develop strategies for the controlled decrease of its density to maintain overall urbanity.

The manifesto lists steps of actions that can be applied to other cities facing depopulation.  However, because each city is unique, the approach must accommodate differences.  When applying this to the city of Buffalo, NY, a difference is that becomes evident is that Berlin’s population was more culturally homogenous.  Buffalo’s urban fabric is divided by Main St., separating the city into racially distinct neighborhoods.  According to 2010 demographics, Buffalo is 50.4% White, 38.6% Black, 10.5% Hispanic and 3.2% Asian.   Ranked second in the country for having the most vacant properties per capita, it has over 10,000 vacant homes. The vacancies in the city coincide mostly with poor, Black neighborhoods, many of which are adjacent to families with deep roots in Buffalo’s history. To apply the Green Archipelago’s methods in their purity, much of the entire East Side of Buffalo would be abandoned, and left to return to nature with remaining inhabited housing sprinkled in between.  One cannot ignore the racist undertones to this action.  It also does little to address the associated homelessness, crime, poverty, and general immobility that could result from the process.  Remaining citizens in the area would be absorbed into a nature grid of farmland or parkland which the manifesto proposed would stimulate new forms of tourism, “such as hunting safaris.”  The manifesto does propose that the Nature Grid accommodate modern infrastructure including connective transportation, super-markets, cinemas, churches and banks which may help to decrease isolation and increase opportunity in those areas.

The major distinctive issue of Berlin was the barrier of the Berlin Wall-limiting access. When applying the Green Archipelago to another city, borders must be considered differently.  The city of Buffalo borders several suburbs to the north, east and south, a large source of down-town labor force and weekend event-goers easily accessed by roads and highways. To the west, Buffalo has an international border: the Peace Bridge to Canada, as well as an underused waterfront--currently industrial and recreational--with the attraction of Niagara Falls just to the north.  Perhaps the archipelago could extend past the borders of the city and even into another country. Also, a city’s economy would need to be addressed in the design. In Buffalo, while manufacturing jobs are decreasing, educational and health services jobs are rising. These campus layouts translate easily into a “city within a city.”

Buffalo represents the American post-industrial Shrinking City.  Its population peaked in the 1950’s at 580,000 and has since declined to about 259,000 people.  Its current density is 7,205.8 people per square mile. Buffalo already has a robust park and park-way system designed by Olmsted.  This makes absorbing vacant parcels into a nature grid a logical approach.  Some of these ideas are already happening, manifesting in urban farming on vacant parcels such as the (Massachusetts Avenue Project, Urban Roots Cooperative Garden, Curbside Crofts, and Queen City Farm), large industrial relics left to be consumed by nature, and strategic demolition of blighted housing.  

Some challenges for the Buffalo Green Archipelago would be the conversion of existing vacant land to productive use.  Since Buffalo supported heavy industry for many years, much of the land is contaminated brown field sites that would be toxic for traditional farming.  There are solutions to this; costs and benefits would have to be considered and alternative uses and opportunities should be explored.  Unique characteristics of the city could be employed within the archipelago.  Boasting eight colleges and universities, these could function as islands of their own, connected by an education infrastructure network so that students could share facilities as the city downsizes, and the general population could have increase access to supplemental education, culture and events on campuses.

The proposal identifies within existing networks and fabrics areas of vacancy and proposed demolition.  Ideal areas are then absorbed into the park and parkway system forming a nature grid around urban islands.  The urban islands were selected similarly to the original manifesto.  Unique groupings of buildings that also support a strong identity or embodies values of the city were identified.  These islands would be nurtured with stimuli and architectural intervention, while their surrounding areas might be left to naturally decay over time.  As the city’s population shrinks, more functions can be rerouted to these buildings-such as libraries, gyms, temporary markets and shelters.  Part of the process of the Urban Archipelago design strategy of intervention and completions might also be disassembly and reassembly- combining activities into fewer buildings, making some mobile and traveling rather than fixed, and rethinking times of operations of activities.  The plan allows the city to react to change over time and maintain urbanity as population continues to decrease.

Sources:

1.       Banham, Reyner. Buffalo Architecture: A Guide. Comp. Buffalo Architectural Guidebook Corporation. Cambridge, Mass. U.a.: MIT Pr., 1982. Print.

2.       Ungers, Oswald M., Rem Koolhaas, Peter Riemann, Hans Kollhoff, Arthur Ovaska, Florian Hertweck, and Sébastien Marot. The City in the City: Berlin: A Green Archipelago. Zürich: Lars Müller, 2013. Print.

3.       Wikipedia: Berlin, Berlin Wall, Buffalo

[2013, MIT joint Architecture and Planning Workshop] in collaboration with Sneha Mandhan

Public spaces in Bogotá, Colombia have historically grown around public institutions such as a government building or a church. The institution provided a sense of stewardship of the space and inspired a sense of ownership among the population of the city, making these squares, parks and plazas major assets to the communities, ensuring that the spaces were used responsibly and actively.

Bogotá’s Parque Tercer Milenio currently suffers from opacity of edges within the park, insecurity and inactivity.  Most importantly, the park is owned by no one. Due to the absence of a public institution in or directly adjacent to the park, it has not been adopted by an institutional body or a community. This has allowed it to fall into a state of disrepair.  New York City’s Bryant Park provides a case study demonstrating how an unsafe and unused public space can be transformed, by design, into a popular and well-maintained place of pride.

Since there are a multitude of public institutions in the surrounding area including  churches, libraries, government institutions and retail areas around the site, the establishment of a new kind of institution, a community garden, is suggested. The proposal structures around an in-depth strategy for the site’s physical design and implementation, and a social integration process through community gardening.  The process of building the garden and managing the farming activities occurs through two parallel systems: a Non-Governmental Organization to manage collective farming on large plots of land, and a San Bernardo Neighborhood Initiative to collaborate and manage farming on individual plots of land rented out by the communities surrounding the park.

The Non-Governmental Organization collaborates with the San Bernardo Neighborhood Initiative and provides opportunities to the homeless population in the area to farm in exchange for meals cooked in the community kitchen on the site. Both organizations manage a seed bank, composting facilities, and a farmers’ market in order to generate self-sustaining farming and food producing cycles within the site. Supplementarily, school workshops and collaborative composting provide community engagement exercises. These processes develop over time both in the short term and the long term, progressively increasing the influence of the garden on the city as a source of pride, inspiration, recreation and fresh food.

    The garden plots form the larger fabric of the landscape in the park, composed of a multitude of systems working together over time. Irrigation, composting, edges, gardens, pathways and markets, all form layers of varying permanence which support each other and are built and expanded as time and demand increases. Activity spaces and social public spaces are interspersed throughout the park. The flow of pedestrians on to the site and connectivity with the neighboring communities increases through extension of the edges and corners into surrounding streets. Daylighting of an existing canal results in the formation of a new natural edge along the south-west edge of the site. An extension of the San Bernardo neighborhood up to the canal brings the urban fabric into the existing site boundaries. The re-designed park creates potential health, social, economic and ecological benefits for the neighborhood through the processes of farming, community organization, education, community engagement, recreation and retail.

[2013, Harvard]

[2012, MIT Core III Architecture Studio]

[2010, University at Buffalo Comprehensive Architecture Studio]