2009 Research Projects
Transforming Squatter Settlements into Urban Neighborhoods (Mexico)
Researchers: Richard De Pirro, with Ana Rita García Lascuráin, Mayra Gamboa, and Juan Carlos Zavala
Urban sprawl is engulfing cities around the world. Unlike the suburbs of US cities, those of developing countries are poor, densely packed, unplanned, and lacking in basic services like water, sanitation, and electricity. Some experts estimate that by 2030 the population of such urban slums will explode to two billion. What can be done to make them livable? De Pirro and his colleagues will develop guidelines to help local officials, residents, and social service agencies ensure that these informal settlements can develop into stable neighborhoods. Architects and urbanists based in Mexico City, they will focus on site selection, layout, provision of infrastructure including land for public services such as schools and playgrounds. They will also propose amendments to the legislative framework for urban development. While focusing on cities in their home country of Mexico, they will also study comparative examples in Colombia and Brazil. Ultimately they plan to publish their work as a book called The Barefoot Urbanist.
Relief Efforts After the 2004 Tsunami (Indonesia)
Researchers: David O’Brien and K. Iftekhar Ahmed
In 2004 a tsunami devastated the western coast of Sumatra, Indonesia, killing hundreds of thousands of people and rendering half a million homeless. Worst hit was the Aceh region at the island’s northwestern tip. While international aid and government assistance flowed into Aceh following the disaster, the relief efforts were not always perfectly successful. For example, post-tsunami emergency housing typically abandoned the region’s timberbased traditions in favor of concrete, sacrificing the spatial flexibility and natural ventilation of traditional construction to rapid industrial-scale production. How have the new houses performed for their residents? One index is the numerous alterations which residents have made to them. These provide the starting point for researchers O’Brien and Ahmed. Architects teaching at the University of Melbourne, Australia, they bring a wide knowledge of disaster relief issues and of the entire Indian Ocean region. They will document the ways residents have altered their houses to better suit their lives and customs, interviewing residents, local builders, agency and government officials. By studying what happens to relief housing after it is provided, they hope to develop guidelines for future efforts, in the Indian Ocean and elsewhere.
A Critique of the Performance of Large-Scale Urban Projects in Bogotá, Colombia
Researchers: Nicolas Tixier, with Ida Assefa, Ricardo Atienza, Camilo Cifuentes, and Celine Rouchy
Since 1999, the city of Bogotá, capital of Colombia, has won nearly a dozen international awards for innovative urban planning, including the prestigious San Marco Golden Lion award, given at the 10th Venice Biennale. For a city once plagued by social disorder and crime, this represents a remarkable comeback. But how have Bogotá’s urban interventions performed for residents? As a researcher at the National Superior School of Architecture of Grenoble’s Sound Space and Urban Environment Research Centre (the Cresson Laboratory), Nicolas Tixier brings a unique set of skills to the question. With a team of Colombian and French colleagues and a battery of equipment ranging from traditional drafting tools to cutting-edge multi-media devices, he will seek to experience and describe Bogotá’s prize-winning parks, government buildings, and public spaces from the perspective of the people who use them daily. The result will provide not only a critique of what has been done but alsoinsights for future planners and architects tasked with reshaping the world’s growing cities.
Housing in China, Exploring Steps Toward a Solution
Researchers: Hai Zhang, with Marcel Baumler and Guochuan Feng
With some of the world’s largest cities, China faces an intense demand for new urban housing. While the government and developers have taken major strides towards housing the wealthy, attention is now shifting to the majority of city dwellers. One result is that China’s urban villages, offering the last available center-city development sites, are being increasingly targeted for redevelopment. But what forms of housing will best meet the needs of ordinary Chinese city-dwellers? Zhang, Baumler, and Feng will bring the disciplines of architecture, urban planning, and documentary photography to the problem. They will investigate both urban villages and new development projects in Shenzhen, as well as an emerging housing form in Shanghai, the group rental, in order to gain insight into the needs and desires of residents. To supplement the statistical information which already exists, they will live alongside and interview residents. They will also organize public meetings in order to initiate dialogue among residents, local officials, designers, and developers.
Past Research Projects
From Industrial Insulation to a Rooftop Learning Landscape in the Bronx:
The Stevenson Green Roof Project
Researcher: Joe Hagerman
In the fall of 2005, research fellow Joe Hagerman came to Rafael Viñoly Architects with a track record and an idea. An architect with experience in housing and a graduate student in Columbia University’s civil engineering program, Hagerman had won Metropolis magazine’s Next Generation Design Prize in 2005 for “Biopavers,” a manufacturing strategy to incorporate bioremediating plantings within concrete pavers. Now, he wanted to study the performance of green roofs. By learning about how heat is actually transferred through the many layers of a green roof, and by bringing his engineer’s experience with materials, he planned to show how green roofs could be better integrated into the design of building envelopes, enhancing thermal performance, facilitating construction and repair, and bringing down costs.
Almost three years later, Rafael Viñoly Architects is leading a public-private consortium to demonstrate Hagerman’s innovations on the roof of a school campus in the South Bronx – and to bring unprecedented learning opportunities to students at seven New York City public schools. Read more >
New Horizons for Composite Fiber Structures: Technology Transfer From Aeronautics to Long-Span Structures
Researcher: Michael Silver
Architect Michael Silver loves to make things. He is also fascinated by the patterns which computers can generate. And he is intrigued by the extraordinary structural and aesthetic properties of carbon and other composite fibers. He approached Rafael Viñoly Architects in the fall of 2006 with a proposal: to explore the potential for transferring what fiber manufacturers have already achieved in aeronautics and other high-performance engineering fields to the design of buildings. Though composite fibers remain expensive, he believed that their superior strength and lightness offered advantages over more traditional structures. His intuition also told him that the technology of computer-driven fiber placement could reveal new aesthetic solutions which transcend the old opposition between structural frame and infill panel. The research quickly evolved into a close three-way partnership among Silver, designers and engineers at Rafael Viñoly Architects, and Automated Dynamics Corporation, an advanced composite manufacturer in Schenectady, New York.
The fruits of this research — a design for a long-span roof structure incorporating skylighting — are now available for others to study and develop further. Drawings and models allow the design’s structural performance, fabrication, assembly, cost, and aesthetics to be evaluated against those of more traditional solutions. Read more >
