Bridging the Divide

Redefining racist infrastructure as neighborhood amenities

Architecture

•

Urbanism

ROLE

Architectural Designer

TIMELINE

6 weeks

TEAM

Peikun Yang, Jiawen Lyu

TECH STACK

Rhino, Grasshopper, Illustrator, Photoshop, V-Ray

CONTEXT

The Cross Bronx Expressway is a lasting physical and environmental scar of the mid-twentieth-century interstate highway system.

It divided neighborhoods, displacede communities, and exposed residents to decades of pollution, noise, and infrastructural neglect. Over the past decade, community advocates, including Loving the Bronx, have advanced the vision to “Cap the Cross Bronx” as a way to repair the urban fabric, reconnect the street grid, and transform the corridor into a shared public asset.

GOALS

Establish a strategy for reconnecting communities across the expressway through new caps, greenways, and public realm improvements;
Propose adaptable public realm buildings that provide shade, enclosure, storage, gathering space, and resources for learning, organizing, and making;
Support future equitable development by creating infrastructure that is accessible, community-responsive, and scalable across New York City.

OUTCOMES

Designed a collection of buildings for pollution control and public amenity.
Created a system for continuous improvement beyond the immediate site.
Capped the Cross-Bronx Expressway to ensure minimal pollution for nearby residents.

CONCEPT

In 5 Elements of a City, Kevin Lynch’s notion of the “edge” is described as a linear element that acts as a boundary between two areas.

The Cross-Bronx Expressway (CBE), running East-West directly through residential neighborhoods in the Bronx, is a clear example of an edge as a kind of contested threshold — where infrastructure and pollution divide, yet also hold the potential for repair.

Black carbon

Carbon monoxide

Nitrogen dioxide

Sidewalk conditions

Major thresholds

Poverty distribution

Initial research conducted into the site revealed insights across three moments in time: before the expressway, in the present, and in the future, if the city’s current proposal were to be executed.

Past (rendered by Kevin Lyu)

Present

Future (rendered by Patrick Yang)

A lively and intimate neighborhood with dense development.

A disjointed urban fabric, ripped apart by the expressway.

A generic urban ‘green gentrification’ project that would displace nearby residents.

Thus, the best framework for repairing the damage done by the expressway is one of simultaneous specificity to the site conditions and generality towards the location of the intervention, as there are several places along the expressway that have the potential for intervention.

Conceptual program & framework

PROJECT DRAWINGS

The project’s foundation rests on the otherwise innocuous object of the highway ventilation shaft: an object sometimes unnoticeable and sometimes enormously large, but never programmatically accessible or understood by the public. The project reinterprets this mundane object as the centerpiece of each program typology.

VIEWING TOWER

THEATER

ART INSTALLATION

CLIMBING WALL

EXHIBIT

MARKET

VERTICAL PLAZA

LIVING MUSEUM

In this way, following James E. Young’s notion of the ‘counter-memorial’, the highway and the history of the site are always embedded in the spatial conditions of the park.