In our analysis of Stamford we focused on the fact that the downtown area is predominately populated with commuters.  The city is purely functional, serving a daytime population of business people without any of the character that comes from or draws in full time residents.  Essentially Stamford is a sort of no place place that is only populated when necessary.  We want to capitalize on the young professional commuter, give them a reason to stay in Stamford and play up the potential allure of these people and this world instead of seeing the city as a sort of cheap suit.  In between the downtown area and the low income residents are a couple of under-utilized parks and some areas that are in some sense left over space.  We hope to use these spaces to create a sense of place and give people a reason to stay in Stamford past 5 pm. In order to create this waterfront area, we looked at a series of precedents that combined urban areas and parks in leftover spaces such as Houston’s Buffalo Bayou and create lively waterfront activity, such as Vancouver.  We are proposing a first phase of construction that provides Stamford with more park, high-end residential buildings, and a commercial center out on the water.  

This is the first phase in what we envision as a scheme that eventually joins up to the Mill River Park.  In the way that RBS worked with the city in order to create a park for the area in exchange for being able to construct a larger building which required closing a city street, we hope to engage in a series of swaps (of FAR), where in each phase there is public space created “in exchange” for something that the city needs such as parking for the train. All of these moves are made in an effort to create a sense of place, an iconic area for Stamford that could be both recognized from the highway as you’re driving by and draw in pedestrians to shop, live, and hang out instead of getting right back onto the train into Manhattan

In addition to my Urban Design studio led by Ed Mitchell, Architecture Theory II with Ariane Harrison, Systems Integration with Martin Finio, Site and Building seminar with Steven Harris, and Diagrammatic Analysis seminar with Peter Eisenman, I am also auditing a course led by Keith Krumwiede. This course is called Performance Criticism and looks specifically at the non-architectural writings of Reyner Banham which were published in various magazines and architectural journals in the 50’s and 60’s. Banham believed it was important to educate architects about (pop) culture, science, technology and occurrences outside their own profession. Such articles ranged from race car events in England, sci-fi movies and machine aesthetics of the time.

I am really enthusiastic about this course because it forces us to think about culture as a whole, not just the academic environment that we tend to get too absorbed. These sorts of small anthropological pieces have sparked an interesting dialogue about our current state because architects are capable of affecting “change in a dynamic and highly contested world of ideas and products,” as Keith states. The weekly discussions make us wonder whether these investigations lead us to any sort of concrete conclusion about our culture and/or if there is any architectural merit in these pieces. Regardless, being aware and educated about the moment you live in, cognizant of current influences, design, technology, new methods of exchanging information and establishing identity is important to architecture. Understanding how these things “perform” is even more crucial to instigating the types of dynamic developments that are asked of architects. Therefore, I am going to start to comment - perhaps without a clear architectural/academic focus - about our contemporary influences, the way media allows us to interact, current trends, and fashion… basically “important” happenings in our society, through the eyes of an architecture graduate student at Yale and a 20 something year old in New York City.  The title of these essays and observations will be called: “These Dais.”

(Left: Coy Reyner Banham. Right: Architecture Ryan Gosling *Meme*) 

The other elective I am taking this semester, along with Peter Eisenman’s Diagrammatic Analysis course on Piranesi’s Campo Marzio, is Steven Harris’ Site and Building class. I am really excited about this class because designing homes is my ultimate goal in architecture. We have to give a presentation on the specific way a house of our choice relates to the site - dissecting every designed inch of it! Really awesome to see and learn the motives behind each move. I have chosen Tadao Ando’s Koshino House in Kobe, Japan completed in 1984.

I was not familiar with this project, but looking forward to studying it more after spending some time looking at drawings and images. I enjoy the way the house reacts to the constraints of the sloping site, and how it appears to intricately nestle and stubbornly interject it at the same time. This provides a reading from within the house that harmonizes the physical state and phenomenological occurrences in relation to light, transparency and program. 

I also appreciate that this house can be analyzed as an independent diagram as well as an organic resultant of the site - both cases which reinforce the simple plan. I’d like to understand why this house appears to be so sound, but hopefully prove myself wrong in the process of analysis. 

I have gotten my top electives again this semester at Yale School of Architecture. It can be a soul crushing process, as I have mentioned before, but I’ve been incredibly lucky thus far.

Peter Eisenman’s seminar this year is about Piranesi’s Campo Marzio (below). We have the unimaginable and impossible task of tracing the plan in 2D CAD format as well as making a digital 3D model from which we will be building a physical model for an exhibition at Yale in September.

Eisenman was inspired by Dean Robert A. M. Stern’s seminar last year called Parallel Moderns, which I was also fortunate enough to have taken. In his class, we reinterpreted the facades along the Strada Novissimo at the 1980 Venice Biennale. We were assigned an architect and then wrote a 15-20 page catalogue of their work in addition to rebuilding/redesigning a physical model of their façade while considering their entire body of work. We recreated the Strada for the final review last December on the central, fourth floor pit. Peter Eisenman crashed our review, and naturally, a great discussion ensued.

So, through the lens of Piranesi we are asked to interpret/ reinterpret Campo Marzio, while of course, considering the dense readings of Tafuri, Rowe, Aureli, Perez-Gomez, Wittkower, Kantor-Kazovsky, etc. Really looking forward to this semester.

I am looking to analyze a variety of cities in order to compare their scalar differences, figure-ground relationships and their means of transporation. GIS (Geographical Information Services) is not complying, so if anyone out there has a major city, or town in any vector-based format that I can use for this comparison I would greatly appreciate it. You can email me at: info at daisyames dot com

I am looking for a wide range of cities and towns… so anything from Mexico City to a small African village would be useful. Thank you! 

I made these sequence of collages to capture the varying lifestyles that the typical businessman in Stamford, CT transitions through on a daily basis. This is all in part to capture the inherent culture of Stamford, which we are redesigning/re-evaluating for our studio project this year. The first image is the bustling commute from New York City, followed by an image of the regimented corporate environment in Stamford. Then, the next image represents the family life in the suburbs juxtaposed to the life of indulgence after hours. Below these images is a sequence of abstractions from these collages that could possibly be used to inform our design in some way. Right now these ideas are very indirect and uncalculated and I am enjoying this approach for once. 

For our design studio this year we are doing an urban design project in groups of two in Stamford, Connecticut. We are analyzing the current social, economic, and physical parameters of the area and making design strategies based on the direction we think the area would benefit most.  Stamford is currently a corporate financial satellite for New York City and hosts a bustling transportation corridor along the Northeastern coastline. It is a town that “works,” economically-speaking, and provides the city with what it needs to accommodate the commuting workers and other operational aspects of the city in a timely and spacious manner.  We have been given two sites to focus our attention on for the first few weeks. One site is in the downtown financial district, and one site on the water, and they are separated by a large low-income multi-family housing district and a cemetery. My partner and I have recognized that the educated workers that commute to Stamford return to New York City immediately after work and have no need stay.  An idea of ours is to establish one or both sites as a place for these workers to spend their time, and potentially view Stamford as a place that offers as good a night life or experience as New York City. Since the commuting population is generally stereotyped as the white, educated, cookie-cutter, corporate, young singles, we have made the obvious reference to Mad Men. So what we want our urban design initiatives to do is encourage these professionals to invest in Stamford, and find a way to keep them there so that Stamford becomes its own enclave of New York City. We are considering Brooklyn, “an enclave of Manhattan,” as an example in which people initially moved their for economical reasons but now have chosen to be separate and embrace the particular “inherent” style that comes along with it, given the fact that places like Williamsburg have rent prices comparable to Manhattan. Yet, Stamford, we are arguing already has its own style – a la Mad Men… and it is our challenge to create spaces and architecture that support this way of life.