Roosevelt Island Shed

Visitor Center
Roosevelt Island, New York City, New York, United States
Rice ARCH 601.3 Fall 2018
With David Rader & Gavin Brown
Instructor Michelle Chang

Roosevelt Island Shed is a project for a visitor center in Southpoint Park, on Roosevelt Island, between Manhattan and Queens.

For contemporary architecture, the roof is as much a legal as it is a material construct. Insurance companies and courts have variously defined the roof, whose most basic definition can be surmised as a permanent building element which protects the building from weather related risks. The contemporary roof is increasingly defined in code as a lamination of increasingly immaterial planes and ‘proofs’: waterproof, vapor proof, puncture proof, fire proof; laminates of decking, insulation, membranes, shingles, and finishes. The New York Building code defines the roof reductively, in legal terms, as an element of maximally laminated, minimal thickness oriented towards the capture of gross rentable space, and thus assumes easy distinctions between front and back, interior and exterior, conditioned and unconditioned, built environment and ‘nature.’

This building mis-appropriates certain idiosyncrasies of New York State’s building code to turn the conventional thinness of the building envelope on its head. Instead, through an oversized and thickened roof plenum, the visitor center produces an architectural and climatic promenade of spaces with varying levels of conditioning, enclosure, visibility, and access.

Sloped roof types (as opposed to flat) retain strong associations with domestic functionality in spite of developments in building technology over the past 100 years that obviate their assumed practical benefits. Gabled and hipped roofs that persist as synonymous with the idea of roof in the popular imagination are duly reinforced by the language of New York’s building code: a roof is defined, for example, as having a slope of between 15 and 60 degrees. The project aims to reclaim the roof as a site and driver of architectural intervention for the visitor center by perverting an a priori functionalist symbolism of ‘roof’ and estranging it from its conventionally domestic context: through shifts of scale, site, enclosure, and program.

Like the visitor center in a park, the hipped roof imposes implicit constraints on enclosure. Since conventionally the hipped roof is supported by point loads at its edges, those edges may well be seen to symbolize a barrier between “inside” and “outside,” or housed and unhoused. The perversion of structure—in its consolidation to a single central truss—facilitates the freeing of the roof edge, symbolically coincident with the edge of the conditioned domestic envelope. While the value of the house largely rests in its capacity to protect from inclement conditions, and the modernist-inflected visitor center seeks to minimize the appearance of this condition in spite of function, both fundamentally reinforce the artificial division of exterior and interior under an iconic roof element. Exploiting this resonance, the project perverts the structure and material appearance of a domestic hipped roof building—here supported by a singular large truss and clad with oversized black asphalt sheets against smooth white “interior” finish—and the constraints they impose on enclosure, in order to perform how a visitor center appears. By perverting structure, material, and edge of the domestic roof, we seek to unsettle assumptions of seamlessness between interior and exterior typically attributed to the modernist glass-clad pavilion in a park.

Selectively interiorized and exteriorized systems—cladding, heating, cooling, glazing, drainage, lighting, waterproofing—contradict the singular edge of the “roof” above. This building seeks to upset the laminated thinness of the building envelope—suggested by the domestic roof and refused by the modernist visitor center, but by code present equally in both—to become not simply thick but grossly so.

Brochstein Pavilion, Rice University, Thomas Pheiffer & Partners. Today’s visitor center can be postulated as its own type: a sculpturally expressive canopy, minimally enclosed by a thin shell of glass, it strives to bring the interior and exterior as close as possible while becoming as unobtrusive as possible—save visually from above or below, as surface. Ultimately this modernist impulse to unify interior and exterior into a seamless continuum actually serves to collapse—and incompletely dematerialize—architecture to an impossibly thin threshold, to which the spate of recent plastic-bubble-in-park projects can attest. The roof is thin, but the air is thick.

The device used to distort the standard domestic roof appropriately comes from within its own formal logic: the dormer lies at the slippage between roof convention and code. Loosely codified as “a vertical projection from the roof plane,” a search reveals a more precise conventional understanding of the dormer as, topologically, a vertically projected deformation upwards in a continuous building envelope, used to recapture enclosed interior space from the slope of the roof. The mismatch between code and convention in the definition of the dormer is a generative device for spaces in the project that reframe assumptions about the roof and enclosure—as being functional and thin—enshrined elsewhere in those codes and conventions.

Code-defined "dormers" instead project planes and lines downwards through the roof, variously capped and trimmed, to shape space in plan and contradict visual perception of interiority and exteriority under one roof. Instead of expanding a hermetic envelope, projections distort and puncture spaces under the roof’s enclosure, exterior cladding material following these punctures into interiorized exterior spaces.

Mark R. Bavoso

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