Dm

Urban Transect to Living Epistructure

Route 23 is a personal research project that I am developing into a studio brief. Stretching north nearly 13 miles from the Sports Complex in South Philadelphia, through Center City East, North Philadelphia, Germantown, Mt. Airy, and Chestnut Hill, Route 23 is Philadelphia’s most traveled surface transportation route and, arguably the world’s longest street car route (although it has currently been replaced by bus service). It cuts through a large swath of Philadelphia, passing through over a dozen neighborhoods of highly varied character and socioeconomic conditions. It traverses Philadelphia’s underlying geological formations, rising over 400 feet along its course.

Route 23 will act as a vector though which to investigate the dense, many layered, and varied urban “ecosystem” of Philadelphia. This studio will view Route 23 as a man-made analogue of a geological fault line or a river bed, demarcating a line of movement and activity within the city that has varied in intensity and use over time. It is a well worn path; a “desire line” of an entire metropolis.

Rather than simply propose the reintroduction of street car service on Route 23 as it once was, this studio aims to re-imagine Route 23, and by extension, the infrastructure of a major city. Students will be challenged to research and redefine the role of the street as a linear public space, a transportation corridor, and a stormwater management system: to design a next generation high performance living epistructure.

Like the High Line in New York, this project seeks to explore a new type of public space along an abandoned rail infrastructure. Yet it differs in several fundamental ways: Route 23 exists not as an etheral, nostalgic sanctuary above the city, but rather is deeply rooted in it’s day to day operations. It has the potential to become a highly productive working landscape; a landscape infrastructure for people, water, energy, vehicles, and economic development.