2024 - Urban Pulse: A Dynamic Living Experience

URBAN PULSE is a bold approach to repurposing an office building in a high-density business district of New York. The aim is to use the circulation of residential housing to highlight activities that take place throughout the day. The proposal consists of multiple layers of activities. The demolishing of the original glazing of the office building created a new skeleton for the project. The idea is to rethink the context of New York and create quality living options that are both innovative and affordable.
The project focus is to find ways to actively engage in the activities of people in New York and to illustrate these activities through architectural applications. Passive design strategies have been used to optimize the building’s performance and adapt to a different way of living. A mesh screen has been implemented that anchor to the original structure of the building, creating layers of privacy, showing activity, and allowing for ventilation and filters light. The mesh screens are incrementally divided into smaller panels that are anchored to the original structure. These screens have fixed and partitioned pieces, with the partition pieces being bi-fold and movable on tracks to allow for easy movement. This exterior layer wraps around the West and South ends of the structure, providing shade from direct sunlight.
Carving into the original structure has created flexible spaces that help with lighting issues that blocked buildings often have. A light well has been created to allow light to come in, acting as a skylight. The floor plans follow the optimal ways of bringing light into deeper spaces. This has been done by carving balcony spaces and adding a layer of self-maintained green space and tracked mesh screens. The entire floor plan includes openings on the North, West, and South end, allowing for passive cooling. This carving into essentially four towers creates a stacking effect that heats and cools the building like a giant chimney, which is beneficial to the context of New York, given its harsh winters.
Day and night activities have been a major focus of this project. Studying the ways that people react to light has created an interesting dialogue between the inside and outside of the building. The façade of the building will open in certain moments within the units, and different cool and warm lights will create a lantern effect on the building, providing evidence of activity. Motion sensor lighting in the common circulatory spaces allows for an interesting play of telling stories of others or engaging in the activities that occur within the scale of the whole building to the scale of units.
The Urban Pulse proposal is about creating a community within a high-density context through a mesh screen. The screen filters light and shades the West and South facade and softens the surrounding context. The depth created through the lighting and activities through the volumetric nodules creates a dynamic way of transitioning throughout the building, showing activities day and night.