Broken Sites

The emergent fields of landscape urbanism and infrastructural urbanism call for architects and landscape architects to participate in the design of infrastructural systems in order to mine their potential within the public realm. This paper looks specifically at the possibility of intervening upon existing works of civil infrastructure in “Broken Sites,” or areas where the continuity of urban fabric has been so severely disrupted by the insertion of infrastructure that it cannot be remediated by the manipulation of the ground plane alone. Through four projects in New York, Rio de Janeiro, and Rome, a design methodology is developed that relies on a deep reading of site where the infrastructural, architectural, social, and ecological are given equal weight, leading to the development of a vernacular tectonic language and three-dimensional form that situates itself somewhere between the determinacy of a building and the open programmatic possibility of a landscape, working to stitch the Broken Site back into the life of the city. Broken Sites are a call for the design community to use its imaginative potential to see the open-ended nature of large-scale works of civil engineering in urban environments, rather than treating them as “completed” mistakes of our past.

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ISBN
978-1-944214-31-9