ENGAGED MATERIAL/
PHENOMENAL URBANISM

 
For the residents of East Harlem, facing some of the highest rates of asthma and heat-vulnerabilty, the report confirmed what many have long known. Their community carries a disproportionate burden of New York City’s biproducts of modern society—power plants, traffic, idling delivery trucks, and acres of impervious concrete surfaces.  

 All of this begs the question, if these modern technologies have wrought such high costs, perhaps we need to look outside modernism for solutions? Perhaps we might find solutions that work as a metabolic system within nature to replace the modernist model of exploitation and waste.

This research set out to explore material/phenomenal ecologies in search of low energy materials-led strategies for mitigating the phenomena contributing to environmental justice issues in East Harlem and beyond. Our proposals would speculate on how urban space might be augmented to mediate these phenomena. The study began with a neighborhood walk with community leaders to collect local insights, and identify opportunities for interventions.

 With those inputs, research continued with a literature review, casting a wide net in search of alternative solutions in the domains of vernacular architecture, biological and natural systems, responsive environments, and material sciences.  Narrowing these lines of inquiry, distinct material phenomena were identified and research questions, and experimental methods established.  Teams then began building (and/or growing) materials/components, testing their performance, and iterating until data pointed toward an effective strategy. 

Work then began on turning these experiments into full scale material systems—assemblies to be deployed to filter/harness site phenomena to mitigate the challenge being tackled—culminating in large-scale prototypes, working out structure, modularity, and details of the system. 

This paper examines a selection of these material systems and associated case studies for East Harlem, speculating on their future applicability, and more generally on an evidence-based, research-led, material practice focused studio approach to spatial justice.