ALT-895
2003
Masterplan for the Sheridan Expressway

Published as Pamphlet Architecture #26, 2004


These projects for the Sheridan Expressway in the Bronx, New York, consider the historical impact of highway standards on the urban landscape, and the potential to act on this landscape by modifying standards and the way they are used. The project comprises an historical analysis of the material and graphic substrates of expressway infrastructure, arguing that these diagrams act as envelopes constraining and regularizing an otherwise dynamic force on urban development; a series of mediations on mutual exclusivity (overlapping constituencies, and other irreconcilables faced by the planner) including the opposition between the natural and the urban, the regional and the local; the establishment of an interference pattern as an alternative geometry to the grid, as the basis for an atlas which suggests new ways of representing the urban plan; and finally 13 projects, or specifications of a flexible code, that suggest ways in which these proposed geometries might become manifest as a post-Fordist, or flexibly specific infrastructure.