brandtheLAND

 I had the privilege while living in New York to spend significant time at Hudson Yards exploring the development and experiencing some of what it had to offer, and it was quite surreal. My final paper focused on Hudson Yards more technically as a community and neighborhood, but this post is a bit more focused on my experience being there.  If you walk up James Corner's Highline Park from the Chelsea Meatpacking District, this is the first view you get of Hudson Yards. It is a truly magnificent open public space always full of people and events, exercising classes, outdoor concerts, immersive art experiences, and celebrations. The visit is never dull or boring, and looking directly up from this point you can see the Edge which is one of the most marvelous experiences you can encounter in the city.  The platform is the highest observation point in the Western Hemisphere, with one section of glass floor to look directly down to the street below.  It would be easy to sp...

 The idea of cohousing is incredibly peculiar to me, and I find it truly fascinating that they even work. Making the conscientious decision to work collectively to build a community seems great, but with the diversity of people and personalities and lifestyles and preferences and diets and ways of living, it is phenomenal to think people can find enough in common to work together anymore - let alone live together and share amenities. In all honesty, cohousing sounds significantly like a cult to me where people have created what I assume is a very closed exclusive community of shared living, all inwardly focused. Furthermore, the introduction of the community from the early design process phase rather than after construction is incredibly unique and different. As a designer, I find enough difficulty accommodating one client's wishes, let alone an entire group of people.      One point that was mentioned in the videos we watched was the large diversity in ages, and tha...

 New Urbanism is a movement that I have heard different debates and opinions about, for it seems that some people are huge fans and some recognize the significant faults. I am more curious, however, about the urban fabric and form created under the guise of New Urbanism as the ideas, techniques, and approaches reference all sorts of best practices, but there's no mention of how these hubs should actually look. To me, new urbanism has a very traditional neighborhood form with a greater density and a few shifts in organization, but I question why the principles established would not work for very contemporary neighborhoods or even applied to co-housing projects at a large enough scale. From my perspective, new urbanism is not enough. Thinking about it as a sort of spectrum, on one end is rural life and suburbanization and on the complete opposite is high density urbanization, and new urbanism seems to fall somewhere in the middle. However, if we think about it in environmental terms ...

  This is a preliminary conceptual masterplan for a development block I designed over the summer for a small town in the southeast region of Mississippi. The project was on the border of the downtown area, but what made the town fascinating was the sense of desperation and necessity they exuded for intervention. While they refrained from admitting it, the town is slowly shrinking away both in development and population, and they hired my team to design a masterplan for this block to ideally bring people back to their community. During the 2020 census, the town even decided to start including convicted felons in their census population, assumedly for financial reasons to make the town appear larger than it actually is. To the northwest was one of the largest prisons in Mississippi, so the town took advantage and the huge spike is clearly visible on their census data.  The town claimed a population of around 3,800, but the actual residential population of free citizens was close...