interlacing networks: luis gomez

The phenomenon of globalization is increasing immigration to the world's largest cities. These cities have become the center of gravity for fluid immigration and actually constitute hierarchies of dominance within a global network. Massive immigration as a synonym of globalization creates different forces in the urban tissue with both dispersed and centralized dynamics giving origin to new interlacing networks. These flows and forces are the seed of this project and will be the generators of new elements that can serve as an answer to the immigration phenomenon and its implications in the global city.

The project is an immigration center where communities can interchange culture and ideas. Immigrant populations are generating their own programs while they search for their cultural identity and place; to this extent the center will be a bridge between the immigrants and the country that can respond to the emerging needs of different communities. The site is within the Flushing Meadows Park in Queens, which is surrounded by the most diverse area in New York and arguable in the United States.

Historically Flushing Meadows Park has been very significant for New York City; this was built to host the world fairs of 1939, 1964 and 1965. In 1966 almost all the structures were demolished and the park was turned over to the New York Department of Parks and Recreation. Since then, parts of the park have been abandoned and are in dire need of reactivation. The proposal of this project is to revive the park by building a decentralized network of buildings that will offer an array of services to the city's different immigrant populations.

The strategy of design revolves around locating strategic points within the park which come from its geometry and become activating nodes needed to pull the landscape. These are also affected by new neighbors or nodes (new networks) which create new formations through the accumulation of material. The new formations are going to be part of a decentralized network of buildings in the park. they are formed by the forces of the nodes, in the same way that the network of immigrants is pulled from different forces in the city that create interlacing networks of different communities--a kind of mesh or “combination of people, ideas or things.”

Isolation and connectivity are two of the major concepts that are active in the immigration phenomenon, and are in turn active in the project in terms of architectural conceptualization. Emphasis on building-landscape relation, which describes the relation between a building and the tissue of the city as part of a network--for example the soft way that the building's skin comes onto the landscape or how the landscape protrudes inside the building--will illustrate the connectivity that exists between the individual and the country. In other instances, that relation is different and isolation is the protagonist, so although the buildings in the park are connected through the network of nodes, they can be isolated from each other.

The proposed project is going to be a critical representation of immigration as a global phenomenon that forms interlacing networks of communities inside global cities.