jersey city embankment

urban practice studio

the embankment: jersey city

like other urban practice studios, students worked in glissando: gliding transition from large to small scales, from group work to individual efforts and from one media to another....and back again so that they might understand the inter-dependency of urban design and architecture.

jersey city’s harsimus stem embankment, just across the hudson river from lower manhattan, is a series of six, one block long, two-story high stone abutments that once held seven rail lines terminating at the hudson river rail yards.

students examined how this abandoned infrastructure might become part of jersey city’s future. studied simultaneously at both the urban and the architectural scales, students developed design proposals that would re-link the city to the hudson river waterfront while repairing jersey city’s damaged urban fabric. the project culminated in thirty-two foot long 1/16”=1’-0” model of each students portion of the site to show how the individual pieces contributed to the whole and a public presentation at the aia-ny.