Analysis: The nature of ‘the street’ is to organize traffic of people and goods within a legal rationale that interprets inter-modal conflict; that is, a rationale that provides for the priority of the car or of the pedestrian. Historically, the American street has been defined as a hierarchical system of modal flows, preferring to optimize automobile traffic over pedestrian and cyclist traffic. This preference for the car has origins in the emergent behavior of horse-drawn carriages, in their practical organizations for life safety, and has since been codified into rigid legal boundaries for automobile travel. The curb, the lane, the median, etc., all exist to mitigate the potential complication of urban pedestrian life from the path of vehicular travel. In this way, the road dominates the street.

The intersection of 4th Avenue and 9th Street is the contemporary American street par excellence; it is characterized by unbroken swaths of asphalt, speeding, rampant double parking, excessive delivery routes, and truncated pedestrian cross-walks. The once “wide, green and dignified” median of 4th Avenue has eroded into in inadequate refuge for pedestrians in order to provide additional lanes of vehicular travel. Our scheme attempts to properly prioritize the pedestrian street experience by re-conceptualizing the organization of vehicle infrastructure.

Concept: As architects, we have been trained to ‘spatialize’ design projects. We believe, however, that’s precisely the problem with the contemporary street; sectional differentiations have turned into rigid domains for vehicle travel. Instead, we propose ‘flattening’ the contemporary street and removing spatio-legal boundaries (i.e. curbs) in order to achieve a single, complex zone of modal cohabitation. By adding complexity to the system through interaction and competition, we believe streets will return to being extravagant pedestrian settings of negotiation and desire.

Precedents of this street type proliferate in Europe under the Dutch title of “woonerf” or the more recent “shared space”; both systems rely on spatial ambiguity to deprive vehicles of pre-determined courses of action and require a series of alert, conscious maneuvers. The result is subdued, but continuously moving, vehicular traffic, and a reinvigorated streetscape supporting a multiplicity of urban behaviors.

Strategy: Our scheme applies a macro-texture to the street, a sinuous, organic patterning, that instigates negotiation between modes by incentivizing smooth surfaces for travel and patchy surfaces for slowness or stasis. The resistance of the surface gradient replaces the spatially rigid curb by causing tooth-rattling vibrations in the vehicle and isotropic routes for the pedestrian. This interface between pedestrians and cars is naturally the slowest moving, and thus the site of most competition: parallel parking or café dining? Our scheme also restores the grandeur of the Avenue median by encroaching on the bloated vehicular domain to establish a public promenade: this becomes the proper location for bike lanes, planting, lighting, newspaper boxes, etc. This allows traditional sidewalks and storefronts to be clear, well-ordered and to displace multiple centers of activity into the central zone. By removing traditional traffic signifiers, a greater sense of responsibility and freedom is transferred to urbanites to resolve temporal conflicts and interests upon a gradient surface.