CU planning students devise Olympic village concepts for New York City

Professor Roger Trancik, ninth from the left, and students and TAs in his Designing Cities in the Electronic Age studio stand on the roof of the Greenpoint Manufacturing and Design Center in Brooklyn, looking across Newtown Creek toward the Queenswest Olympic village site they are designing for a course project. Third from left is Cornell alumnus Wilbur Woods, B.Arch. '59, director of waterfront and open-space planning for the New York City planning department. The midtown Manhattan skyline is in the background. Courtesy of Roger Trancik

By Linda Myers

New York City is vying with about six others to host the Olympics in 2012. Should it win, it will need to construct housing and other facilities for about 16,000 athletes and coaches accessible to the Olympic playing fields scattered throughout New York City.

The site it plans to use is located at the southern end of western Queens on 39 acres of brownfields -- once a manufacturing hub -- where Newtown Creek flows into the East River waterfront, across from midtown Manhattan. This fall, for their main project in Professor Roger Trancik's five-credit urban systems studio course -- Designing Cities in the Electronic Age -- 15 Cornell landscape architecture and city and regional planning seniors and graduate students, working in seven teams, took on the Olympic village as an exercise in planning and design. Their designs need to include support facilities for the games and must be flexible enough to convert easily into permanent living and working spaces once the Olympics is over.

"The site for Olympic village presents a unique opportunity to design and build, from scratch, an innovative new neighborhood of the 21st century," said Trancik, a professor of city and regional planning and landscape architecture. "Earlier this year, New York's Olympics committee commissioned a professional firm to prepare a schematic plan for the Olympic village as a 'springboard' for an international design competition. This preliminary plan and program of uses was the point of departure for the students' work in the studio."

Trancik and his students went to the city early this fall to document the site and meet with Olympics committee 2012 planning staff, representatives from New York City's planning department and community, city, state and Port Authority leaders involved in the Queenswest development project. "It was a great field trip. We met all the major players," said Alex Hart, a joint M.L.A.-M.R.P. student.

"They took us up on the roof of the industrial design center, which has great aerial views, told us about the history of the area, supplied us with photographs and let us take our own," said Christine Simpson, an M.L.A. student who is Hart's teammate.

The students took notes on the site's limitations -- among them a railroad line that bisects the site -- and the stringent demands of the planners -- for example, while about 4,400 apartments need to be built, 25 percent of the limited area needs to be parkland. Their final projects were presented Dec. 10 in West Sibley Hall's GEDDES computer studio. And they will be shown next week in New York City to city and Olympic committee staff, who promise written comments.

Rather than build 40-story buildings with the best river views limited to those able to afford them, all of the projects proposed constructing mixed-use lower buildings in keeping with the surrounding neighborhoods' essential character and with New York's own 1916 zoning ordinance that resulted in stacked "wedding cake" buildings allowing more sky exposure, noted Trancik.

Hart and Simpson proposed a "walkable" village, treating the area much like the winding streets of Greenwich Village in lower Manhattan, with sidewalk cafes and craft shops visitors can stroll by. Their plan stresses that views of the river and Manhattan skyline are to be open to all, instead of a wealthy few. In addition, it features clusters of low buildings with commercial space on the first floors and apartments on the upper floors. The neighborhood is intended to be car free.

"When you're in this area, you don't have to hop into your SUV and drive to Wal-Mart, you can just walk to where you want to shop," said Hart.

The rail line problem is partially solved by building a parking garage above the rail yard where residents can leave their cars. Rather than a standard, solid parking garage, they propose a terraced structure, with directed walkways and plantings. A map they created measuring the distance between the garage and the farthest residences ensures that walking distances are reasonable.

Another team, Moon-Gi Koh and Susan Luescher, employed environmental sustainability concepts in their proposal -- calling for recycled water, green roofs on the parking garages, treating the shoreline in an ecologically responsible way and preserving the area's soil and vegetation.

Another sustainable feature proposed by students included houses employing solar energy. A third project, by Nathan Barnhart and Laura Shagolov, echoed the transformation of the Corona dump in Queens into the 1939 World's Fair fairgrounds.

While Trancik's Olympic village studio helped the students test out some original planning and design ideas shared with the site's planners, the actual project's ultimate designers are professionals who will be selected by the New York City Olympic committee through an international competition. Finalists are expected to be announced Dec. 12, and the winner selected from that group. Whatever group is finally chosen would do well to incorporate some of the innovative ideas proposed by Trancik's students.