The Bronx, New York
The East Tremont section of the Bronx is the site of Twin Parks Northeast Housing; the area exhibits the classic symptoms of urban decay: vacant lots, boarded-up storefronts, traditional row housing now fallen into tenement use, and a landscape of broken glass, strewn garbage, and crumbling brick. In a 1967 study, the Urban Design Group of the New York City Planning Commission identified certain pockets of land that were not large enough for conventional development. On these sites, the Twin Parks Association, a non-profit, community-based company, was empowered by the city to sponsor moderate-income housing. The concept was to integrate the new buildings into the existing urban context in such a way as to revitalize that context and to provide a maximum of usable private and public space for the needs of both the residents and the community at large.
The site of Twin Parks Northeast occupies parts of three adjacent city blocks. The slabs are wedged in between the existing tenements on the blocks and scaled and oriented to fit with them, thereby reinforcing the existing street “walls”. The irregular street grid gives the buildings their two different axes of orientation, and provides a device for relating them across the blocks. Their dark brown color and masonry texture further relate them to the existing buildings, while their elevational treatment and massing give definition to the center and edge of the blocks, and differentiate between public and private spaces.
Twin Parks Northeast is intended not as an architecture of isolated and freestanding building in space, but rather as a place of urban continuity. It emphasizes the adaptive capability of the existing city grid to new structuring, and incorporates some of the quality and texture of traditional building within a humane, modern vocabulary. In both its form and its organization, it expresses the attitude that one of the principal roles of a building in an urban milieu is to make a larger urban statement, to be the generator of social and communal values.
Twin Parks Northeast Housing是一座由Richard Meier设计的社区住宅区，位于纽约布朗克斯的East Tremont区。这个社区是为了促进城市复兴而建立的，旨在将新建筑物与周围的城市环境相结合，为居民和社区提供最大化的公共和私人空间。建筑的颜色和质地与周围的建筑相似，同时它的立面处理和建筑体量创造了中心和边缘空间的定义，并区分了公共和私人空间。整个社区的设计强调了现有的城市网格对新的结构的适应能力，并将传统建筑的质感和纹理融入到现代建筑语言中。建筑的组织形式表达了建筑在城市环境中发挥的重要作用，即成为社会和公共价值的生成器。总之，Twin Parks Northeast Housing是一座充满人文情怀的现代社区住宅区，强调了建筑与城市的连续性和互动性。