Sou Fujimoto and Tribeca Tomorrow

Solid Sexy Beast: Sou Fujimoto - Canopia – Proposed 2016 – Bordeaux like the wine – with Laisné Roussel

It is an uproar, a dodecaphonic revival of bitching and moaning but the sun shines feistily on this very Monday, 20 March 2023; we got used to spring not starting when it should but the rezoning of Tribeca of Manhattan is just ridiculous and a pain in the ass and nobody will ever build at these conditions:

Zoning overlays residential and non, maximum heights, lot coverages and setter backers rear and front and up and down and sky penetration planes, ass and pussy, and required street walls and 

Drunken Sexy Beast: Sou Fujimoto - Canopia - Proposed 2016 - Bordeaux like the wine -  

with Laisné Roussel

sophisticated air right transfers and abatements and bonuses: same old equally upsetting to the cheap developer and the revolutionary architect.  Business as usual.

But 2 new Building Classes are just not acceptable:

1.     Buildings need to be Performance Type III or better

2.     Buildings need to be Carbon Type II or better

What do this restrictions mean? What do we need to calculate here? Why does the Major and city planning try to screw us like this?

Pages and pages of formulas and modelings and the certifying consultants thieves. But these are the new environmental benchmarks and money is there to be made in a strong market and the environmental classes are there to be met or else…

Let’s cut to the CLT chase, glulamed and all:

Performance Type: adopts passive house criteria for level of insulation (Size Thicker Matters,) air tightness and energy and resources consumption of building systems. You can stick the glass façade up your ass because even quadruple glazed windows are not insulative enough to meet the major’s smiley face: How am I going to sell my Tribeca luxury apartments with small windows? Don’t build if you cant. Go fishing, who gives a fuck.

Carbon type: just what I feared, you calculate the total volume of each utilized building material and with formulas with zero wiggle room you get to a number: the Embodied Carbon.  The new pain in the ass, the nightmare of this fucking millennium. From when you dig the copper, to the piss in the sewer of mine workers to the first class air trip of management, to extracting, melding, mixing, making and shipping and packing and unpacking and swearing and sweating and usual plumber cutting the pipe to short and discard and on and on until it is installed and the building dead again and it recycled. Impossible to calculate but there are formulas for each material and cheating is fucking harder than it should be. So what does Carbon Type II or I mean. It means that you are lucky if you

Green Sexy Beast: Sou Fujimoto - Canopia - Proposed 2016 - Bordeaux like 

the wine -with Laisné Roussel

are able to use concrete and steel for foundation and if the ground water were lower they would force Carbon Type I on you,  driven blackened chestnut piles supporting an impregnated CLT mat as foundation. So if you want to build up 200 foot in Tribeca you need to do it in mass timber, and more than that, you will need to check where this wood-would comes from and if the cheaper and subtler European engineered wood elements were shipped over in containers on a sail boat or if these containers came on a train from the Carolinas or Canadas. And you won’t meet Carbon Type II building with the cheap aluminum façade because that material is so fucking heavy in Carbon that a plane out of it couldn’t take off.

And once the tears dried and the bitching and moaning quitters and landlorders must command less for their build able square feet because at these conditions and under these harder ships less money is to be made, it will appear that there is still money to be made, maybe lesser but maybe notter but there is profit somewhere and they will all do as they are told, the geces and ceems and pees and archs and developers and aiaitchjeys and fireman and buyers and workers and unions and the police alike.

Floor dissolution in Timberland: Sou Fujimoto – Final Wooden House – 2006 - Kumamoto 

And every new building down there is going to be mass wood, all over the place, and it will smell like in Don Quichoteian wind mills and the USDA and the White House will reciprocratingly pat their shoulders about the unexpected upgrade: a first world country becoming a world-major extractor of a carbonified commodity: How Much Wood Will  a Woochuck laminate? You don’t even need to water the fucking forests they just grow by themselves. And the usually stigamticied agricultural monoculture here is just called Forest without that minus: plant some new ones and don’t let them deer eat them and you are good with or without lime and salt.

And where does tweeting Sou Fujimoto fit in all of this except for Tribecas enduring love of vinegared handrolled bytes?

He will be 52, young for such a successful architect with people wondering about the not-yet-pritzker-pricy and he will be proud and angry, because his 200 foot tall wood skyscraper will be one

The Genius: Shigeru Ban – a stick frame building – Tamedia – 2013 - Zurich

of the first new buildings in the rezoned Tribeca preselling well at $7,000/SF (I will talk more about inflation in other posts) with some nice inventions for mass timber, some kick ass connections and structures, just like the Japanese crafters have always done it and he will be pissed off because he couldn’t use the skinny steel rods to lighten his structure, to erase floor separations and the 

The Prophet: Michael Green – a case for preaching and nailing it – T3 – 2016 – Minneapolis

seamlessly inside-outing, the stupid (I know words too made that celebrity famouser) glass restrictions and thick insulated walls are a drag but overall it will look just fine and we all will whine from our hearts because we won’t be able to afford to live there.

The Inventor: Andrew Waugh – panelize panelize panelize CLT up and high - Stadthaus Murray Grove – 2009 - London