Tatiène Guia Digital Portfolio

Vernonia

This design was a semester-long project responding to the prompt “Demonstrate or raise awareness of climate change and environmental processes in New Jersey.” I selected a site in the Palisades, by the NY-NJ border, and used the natural freeze-thaw cycles to highlight erosion and forest succession in a disturbed site. My end design was an organic form that mimicked the shape of the spray of flowers of the native plant Ironweed (Vernonia fasciculata) using concrete and glass to create an overlook of New York City’s suburbs along an existing hiking path. I selected materials that would continue to have solidarity and strength for many years, with the intent that the grated skylights on the platform become the focal point of the environmental processes of land below the platform and also the platform itself.

I started my process by mapping the water flow of the area, to determine where the most water erosion would occur. The site is a seasonal waterfall, one of the many that only become visible during the annual snowmelt.
The model is placed along this seasonal creek, just above where two existing hiking trails split. It is between the Women’s Federation Monument and the State Line Overlook, an easy hiking path for all ages along the edge of the Palisades cliff overlooking New York City.
The platform’s skylights, that allow for light penetration to the ground level, as well as the spiral staircase that meets grade at an existing climbing path down the cliff face.
The top of the platform, showing the staircase entry and the canopy-level punch-throughs that allow existing on-site trees to remain and flourish.
The platform meets grade via a bottleneck that sweeps through the treetops and trunks of the trees along the existing trail.

The next stage of this process was physically modelling the design, for which I reworked my 3D model to be extrusion printed. I made the landscape setting at two scales, to explore the design both in its immediate context and in its impact on the greater cliff edge.

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