stitching city: juliana zambrano

Cities are human-made environments where life develops. Just like in natural environments, each being constructs a stage for living through their transit, changing it, adapting it, rebelling against it, in order to make it their own. With every routine and every action that leaves a mark on the urban structures – be them litter, stickers on a traffic sign, dents in a sidewalk or instant graffiti – the physical space and its rigid skeleton are coated with a tenuous, micrometric varnish that gains depth and complexity with time and traffic. The city resists and succumbs, as it becomes sensitized and humanized in spite of its severity.

Actions taken in open spaces create these new layers that envelop their contours, transforming them into more approachable structures that can be appropriated by their users and observers. In this process we see open spaces morphing into urban, public spaces. Through these layers the urban landscape begins to reflect its users and provides the setting for a symbiotic process of identification and recognition. This is the natural relationship between an environment and its inhabitants.

Bridges, highways, parkways, are paradoxical urban pieces: they connect and disconnect. They bring together two points but break possible perpendicular relationships between the structure and its surroundings. This thesis finds its site in the point where the Brooklyn Queens Expressway meets the Brooklyn Bridge, the Williamsburg Bridge and the Humboldt Street, and the array of people-space relationships that take place in this location. Being some of the most turbulent space around the BQE – where countless, fragmented and unpredictable interactions converge – this is a site for holistic human experiences that go beyond engaging the senses.

On this lively transit corridor various layers of vehicles parallel to several layers of pedestrian pathways, all happening on a steep topography. This proposal seeks to engage all of these levels through a transversal relation that serves multiple functions in the area. In addition, this intervention aims to transform the daily pedestrian path at ground level and propose a new one cutting into the BQE. Both structures/strategies hope to stimulate a more interesting pedestrian transit that fosters a curiosity in experiencing these urban surroundings.