Reimagining Washington Place

When starting the final, I thought a lot about whether or not NYU has a sense of place distinct from the city around it. With each year at NYU, my workload and my time spent on campus increase proportionately, and I've lately found myself wishing I could just sleep in the Gallatin lounge. I'm becoming almost too familiar with the place, yet I can't quite place an identity to it. NYU, as a "place," is conflicted. It doesn't know whether it should be integrated into the urban fabric or should separate itself off, and has done neither successfully. On the one hand, NYU is integrated into the fabric of lower Manhattan: there are no clear boundaries or edges between it and the rest of the city. Unlike other universities in the city, like Columbia, with a distinct campus feeling created through architecture, gates, and closed off streets, NYU's buildings, sprinkled throughout lower Manhattan, are not necessarily distinguishable from the surrounding cityscape. Some buildings are so far from the Campus Core, like Third North, that they can hardly be considered a part of whatever "campus" we do claim. On the other hand, NYU does not "feel" the same as the rest of the Village. It is seriously lacking in ground floor retail and attractions and, because of a love affair with Philip Johnson in the 1960s, has a disproportionate number of "brutish" architectural buildings. During the time between classes, the streets are packed, but lay almost empty during each hour and fifteen minute period (not mixed use!). Students flock to the park (benches!), which has been identified with NYU, but certainly isn't "our" space. For me, a sense of "community" is spatially related; running into people you know unexpectedly makes the city feel smaller and makes me feel more connected and grounded in New York and NYU. On the whole, however, NYU does not do a very good job of providing spaces to facilitate spontaneous interactions. The public spaces the university provides are usually quieter study spaces--the library, the lounges most academic buildings, computer labs... With these issues in mind, I set about redesigning Washington Place between Broadway and Mercer. Ideally, I'd knock open the ground floor of the Meyer Hall and give the space a nice little sidewalk cafe and other ground floor retail to reintegrate the land use of the campus back into the City, but I gave myself the parameters of working with the existing architecture and land use. (In my opinion, not only would this create a better street scape, commercial uses would also provide a reason for the non-NYU public to use the streets around NYU buildings.) My redesign visually separates out the street from the rest of the city. If not as a "gateway" into the campus, I'd envision it as an identifying feature and as a place that facilitates spontaneous interactions. My placement was definitely influenced by Gallatin's efforts to create these types of spaces in the building redesign (which I think have been fairly successful), so I am just taking what Gallatin has already done and dragging it out onto the street. More screen shots are up on my flickr, with larger sizes: http://www.flickr.com/photos/7230238@N02/ (I am trying to figure out how to make a video jobbie of the sketchup file, and I will post it on youtube and here if I can figure it out. 3D is awesome!)

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