Special Mention
2010 Skyscraper Competition
Kostas Grigoriadis, Alex Robles – Palacio, Irene Shamma, Pavlos Fereos
United Kingdom
The project is a housing proposal for the Hudson Yards area of New York, which is currently occupied by a train depot that forms a recess in the continuity of the ground plane at pedestrian level. Acting as a physical division, the depot prohibits any connections of the Midtown part of Manhattan to the Hudson River while also creating a programmatic boundary with transportation and industrial uses bordering the adjacent residential and commercial areas.
Urban Reef addresses these problems of localized ground discontinuity and programmatic and physical isolation within a larger urban area by proposing a highly connected three-dimensional network of housing integrated with commercial as well as recreational uses. Working to a brief of three thousand housing units, the normative isolated high-rise building type found in New York, is replaced by a series of mid rise buildings that incline to minimize structural spans and interconnect in order to maximize the area available for housing and communal space development. Read the rest of this entry »