Underground: The next urban frontier

[M II A II R II K]

Underground: The next urban frontier


Dec 10, 2011

By Will Doig



Read More: http://www.salon.com/2011/12/10/unde...ier/singleton/

It’s hard to sell people on a destination located within the earth’s crust. For decades, cities have tried to entice us below street level with malls, restaurants, museums and tourist walks. But thrilling to the underground seems to go against our very nature. Put as many Forever 21′s as you want down there — subterranean spaces often end up dingy, depressing and feeling like a grave. But even if we’ll never prefer a basement apartment to a penthouse, or an underground retail district to a walkable street, we might make the space under the sidewalks livable yet. A combination of technological advances and some recent changes in urban dynamics is sending developers onward and downward — even in New York, where, as Dan Barasch puts it, “People have been trained to think of underground systems as ugly, dirty, smelly and filled with rats.”

- Barasch and his partner James Ramsey are the co-designers of a wild new public-park concept cast in the mold of the city’s acclaimed High Line — except that instead of hoisting their park into the sky, they want to sink it into the mud. Envisioning a verdant cave filled with grass and trees, the park would be set in an abandoned railroad tunnel underneath Delancey Street in Manhattan, and lit with actual sunlight collected in dishes on the surface. “There are three components,” says Ramsey. “You gather the sunlight, concentrate it, then funnel it through fiber-optic cables and distribute it. What that allows you to do is, in effect, create a remote skylight.” Underground sunlight could be the revelation that beneath-the-street development has been waiting for. Photosynthesis is only part of it, though the fact that it will allow vegetation to thrive is a key benefit. Funneling sunlight through fiber-optic cables was pioneered in Japan in the 1970s, but Ramsey says that to his knowledge, nothing that utilizes this technology has yet been attempted on the scale of a public park.

- Proponents of landscape infrastructure assert that every inch of a city can be used, and sometimes in multiple ways: aqueducts can be boating canals, power-line towers can be viewing platforms, and the little green spaces adjacent to freeway on-ramps can be pocket parks for a game of Frisbee. It’s a school of thought that’s gaining traction — both above the surface and below it. The way cities choose to develop those underground spaces is changing, too. Simply burying a shopping mall hasn’t worked well in the past – success stories like Montreal’s Underground City are the exception; gloomy boondoggles, like the seamy Underground Atlanta, are the rule. And those kind of projects are even less likely to work today, because the success of development — underground or otherwise — “depends on what market forces are at work during that time,” says Barasch. And today’s market forces favor unusual, eye-popping amenities that will attract creative, talented workers who are looking for a unique urban experience, not just a pair of jeans at a subterranean Gap.

- To be sure, upside-down high-rises, or “earthscrapers,” aren’t right around the corner. Myriad conundrums, from ventilation issues to earthquake concerns, need to be addressed. But early schematics are already envisioning some fascinating solutions to these problems. A prototype for an earthscraper in Mexico City, where height-limit laws have created devastating sprawl, includes a series of “earth lobbies” where trees freshen the air, and power-generating turbines are spun by groundwater. Maybe the biggest issue, though, is justifying the costs. Wouldn’t it be easier to just keep building upward? Usually, yes, which is why underground development probably makes most sense when there’s already a cavity to be filled. Matthew Fromboluti, a designer with OX Studio, recently proposed an underground building in a 300-acre-wide pit mine in the desert outside Bisbee, Ariz. In situations like this, subterranean construction could actually make more sense than a skyscraper, especially as energy costs rise in the future.

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NYC - Delancey Underground: http://delanceyunderground.org/

D.C. - Dupont Underground: http://www.dupontunderground.org/

[s.p.hansen]

Could the Underground "Low Line" Be New York's Next Great Park?

By Alex Davies
Treehugger

Under Delancey Street in New York City's Lower East Side, an abandoned trolley station lies unused since 1948. Following the transformation of a former elevated railroad track into the now famous High Line park, Dan Barasch and James Ramsey have put together a proposal to make the empty space into an underground park: the Delancey Underground.

How It Would Work

It's normal for your first reaction to be, "huh?" But if Barasch and Ramsey can pull it off, it could bypass the High Line and Central Park as the top dog in New York's park system. The idea is to use innovative solar technology to create the impression of sunlight coming through skylights where there aren't any.

Ramsey first thought of the idea of the "low line" while working on solar redirection technology, when he heard that there were a dozen or so abandoned spaces like this around New York City. He saw the implementation of his work there as a natural fit. It's a "fairly simple concept," he told me.

An above ground optical system concentrates sunlight and redirects it using tubes and fiber optic cables. Not only does it feel like sunlight, it's enough to support photosynthesis, meaning you can have real plants.

http://www.treehugger.com/urban-desi...-spot-nyc.html

[THE BIG APPLE]

I saw a documentary in 2009 (forgot the name) it said Chicago was going to have this underground "building" so to speak, and many of them.

[BIMBAM]

This is totally doable and exists. Toronto as an enormous underground city known as PATH, the largest by square footage, and neighbouring Canadian metropolis Montreal also has a very large underground network, the world's longest. So far they're mostly retail while linking up subway stations, neighbouring office buildings, schools, sporting arenas and such to the network. Neither has currently expanded into rolls beyond retail and providing a warm indoor alternative to streets during the cold Canadian winters. What other economically viable rolls do you fellow posters think these networks could fill, in the cities they currently exist in or in others (New York).

[Rizzo]

^ What I've never cared for in underground malls and pedways is how mismashed and disjointed they get in their architecture and layout. Toronto's is the best I've seen personally by far, but that doesn't mean I care for the design of it. The design is usually left up to the building owner. And for fire protection reasons you get tons and tons of doorways to pass through.

In Chicago's pedway system, they triple up the fire doors in many places!! I do think they have a necessary place though in cities. I don't believe they take away from street life, but provide a good alternative for when the weather is bad to venture across several city blocks from the office.

[urbanlife]

Originally Posted by Hayward

^ What I've never cared for in underground malls and pedways is how mismashed and disjointed they get in their architecture and layout. Toronto's is the best I've seen personally by far, but that doesn't mean I care for the design of it. The design is usually left up to the building owner. And for fire protection reasons you get tons and tons of doorways to pass through.

In Chicago's pedway system, they triple up the fire doors in many places!! I do think they have a necessary place though in cities. I don't believe they take away from street life, but provide a good alternative for when the weather is bad to venture across several city blocks from the office.

Chicago's system is definitely an interesting one. Would of been nice if the city used some real urban planning when designing theirs rather than leaving it up to each building to decide how to deal with connecting to the system. Though I will say navigating them is really entertaining and get yourself really lost after a while until you go back up to the surface.

[Tony]

Toronto Mulls Plan to Expand World's Longest Underground Shopping Complex

Carys Mills (Globe and Mail)

More than a century after Toronto’s first underground pedestrian walkways were built, the city is finishing off a master plan that calls for the PATH system – the world’s longest underground shopping complex – to extend south toward the waterfront.

As more people start living and working south of the traditional financial district, the PATH will have to be able to get them there, said Michel Trocmé, a partner in Urban Strategies Inc. He helped develop the draft plan, expected to be voted on by city council in 2012 and which will also influence the city’s official plan review in the fall.

...

“This opens up the whole waterfront to the PATH,” he said, noting thousands of employees will be working out of the building.

As well, the plan suggests there should be access from Union Station to waterfront development east of Yonge Street.

The report also says the system be extended west from Yonge Street toward University Avenue, where there are a cluster of hospitals near part of the University of Toronto campus and Queen’s Park.

(source: Globe & Mail)

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/...rticle2277195/

[M II A II R II K]

Make Way, High Line: Former NASA Engineer Kickstarts “LowLine” Underground Park


February 22nd, 2012

By Shoham Arad

Read More: http://www.fastcodesign.com/1669107/...derground-park

The success of New York’s High Line park has inspired urban planners around the globe to refashion unused infrastructure into soaring parks. And now, it has inspired something close to its opposite: The LowLine, an underground park whose fundraising drive is kicking off today on Kickstarter. If successful, it might eventually become the most massive project ever begun by the crowd-funding website. For now, the visionaries behind the LowLine are hoping to raise $100,000 to create mock-ups of their technology that will bring natural light into the space.

- Ramsey, a former NASA satellite engineer and current principal at RAAD studios, has developed a series of fiber-optic tubes specifically for this project. The use of this kind of green tech is usually confined to massive projects in far away places, experiments on the edge of actually being built. Ramsey is adamant that it’ll work, and will make accessible what has previously been hidden in the depths. “That process of discovery, of finding something like this that was lurking beneath the surface, was something that I found so compelling, that I felt like, this experience, this space, was something that needed to be shared with more people. One of the easiest ways to get people to consider a space like this would be to introduce natural sunlight,” says Ramsey.

- Having learned much from the Highline, the LowLine aims to be a beautiful, public space that is created with the input of the community from the very beginning. Barasch and Ramsey are spending the next 12 months before the MTA’s request for proposals is due, engaging the community in this Lower East Side neighborhood. They will be presenting the park project at high schools and community meetings, making the space a focused studio and working with students in Marc Kushner’s curriculum at The Columbia University School of Architecture, as well as working with the consulting firm Purpose to explore new ways of engaging people online--everything they can think of to get a dialog going and incorporate feedback into the process.

- Today’s Kickstarter campaign is meant to be a start. Eventually, they hope to fund an event drawing on the legendary artists and musicians who have made the Lower East Side the mecca of the creative community that it is. To that end, the keyword for the design process is conservation--the original architecture of vaulted ceilings and railroad tiles, and the surrounding fabric of the neighborhood. Dan Barasch lives on the LES, and he’s got a stake in it. “We want to preserve all we can of this shared legacy. The LES has always been rock and roll, and that’s not something we want to tone down so much that we lose it," he says. "Right now it’s dirty and wild and vast. It’s the magic of what’s to come”

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[JohnMarko]

The 1965 New York Worlds Fair had a really neat underground home - the "Formica House of Tomorrow" I think.

That and James Bond's Aston Martin were the highlights for me - the German Beer Garden for my dad...

I'm still waiting for my flying car!!!

[M II A II R II K]

Proposed Lowline Underground Park Debuts “Solar Harvesters” for Subterranean Photosynthesis


09/13/2012

By Alex Goldmark

Read More: http://transportationnation.org/2012...ynthesis-pics/

New Yorkers can get their first peek at the technology required to construct a proposed park in an underground abandoned trolley station. A year ago (almost to the day). the Lowline project teased the imaginations of New Yorkers and dazzled park lovers everywhere by releasing dreamy renderings of a lush park paradise-to-be in a most unlikely place: below ground. And not just below ground, but below Delancey Street, one of the most disparaged and dangerous stretches of asphalt in the whole city for a pleasant pedestrian stroll.

- “On top of this roof we created a massive superstructure, that’s way in the air, that’s actually harvesting the sunlight, redirecting it through light pipes,” Ramsey says. A computer guides the rooftop solar collectors to track the sun all day long for maximal reflected light through a system created by a Canadian company, Sun Central. To fund the exhibit, the Lowline raised $155,000 on Kickstarter. But it has to cross a number of hurdles before — not to mention if — it becomes reality. Ramsey cautioned that the final design will depend on “many, many different conditions.” Including negotiations with several city agencies.

- Delancey Street — presently under a years’ long redesign to become more bike and pedestrian friendly — would need another overhaul to install “remote skylights.” The preliminary engineering study for the Lowline is still weeks away from being finalized. That will bring with it cost estimates for tasks like lead paint abatement and adding drainage. After the price tag is tabulated, a design will be hatched, and the dreamers crazy enough to build a park below a busy city will have to commence some serious fundraising. Also sharing space with the “Imagining the Lowline” exhibit is “Experiments in Motion,” an installation sponsored by Audi and executed by Columbia architecture students to explore multi-modal transportation possibilities. The centerpiece of the projects on display is a 50-foot 3D model of New York’s underground public spaces, mainly subway stations, meant to place the Lowline in spacial context.

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