Pressure Housing deals with two specific issues regarding housing in New York City. It responds to increasingly inflated land value within the city limits and the resultant economic polarization of population living in or advantageously close to Manhattan. In addressing these larger scaled issues, the strategy of Pressure Housing is to employ mechanisms at the scale of the dweller.
Using a split section typology, the inconsistency of floor-to-ceiling heights and slab breaks allow for a more malleable regulatory frame for unit configuration. The flexibility afforded by the use of the split section typology allows for the building to handle a greater density of units. With the unit configuration design becoming a sort of packing or puzzling exercise played against structural, mechanical and access constraints to accommodate almost 30% more units than would have been in constructed a building of comparable volume.
Because of the tightness of the units, space needed to be maximized using other means. In addressing this, there had be some programmatic variability. The skin therefore was a major point of attack, in granting for its respective dweller something that was lost in the consolidation of space. The skin took on a much more programmatic role, pushing the limit of the thickness and depth of its application.
The surface of the building indents into the perceptual interior of the building’s structural frame, carving outdoor spaces, and allowing for multi-directional light infiltration. The skin’s framing enables specific translucent glass panels to be shifted or moved along a track, allowing an individual user to control the specific amounts of direct light into the space as well as determining its level of privacy.
The project was completed in collaboration with Jerome Hord, under studio professor Lawrence Blough in the fall of 2007.