No architect is an island
Rice fellow, alumnus re-imagine Manhattan through Archiprix

BY MIKE WILLIAMS
Rice News staff

Re-imagining Manhattan in a week was hard enough. But first, the members of Neeraj Bhatia’s team had to learn to talk to each other.

Bhatia, a Visiting Wortham Fellow who will start his second year teaching at the Rice School of Architecture in the fall, led a group of the world’s best recent architecture graduates in this year’s Archiprix, a biennial workshop and competition held last month at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, with an awards ceremony in New York City.

	An international team led by Neeraj Bhatia, a Visiting Wortham Fellow at Rice, strategizes on its project during an Archiprix workshop. The team’s effort to redesign Manhattan was on display at the Guggenheim Museum in New York.

Of 400 international students who submitted their senior designs for judgment, 100 participated in the workshop and split into nine teams. Bhatia’s group was one of only four whose project was presented to an audience at New York’s Guggenheim Museum and Center for Architecture.

The honor came at the end of a challenging week and a half in which Bhatia and team collaborated to come up with a radical vision for 2040 Manhattan to make it sustainable amid rising sea levels.

None of the nine students — from India, Chile, Russia, Mexico, Istanbul, Austria and three from Italy — was a native English speaker. That left the Toronto-born Bhatia with quite a task.

“We often had to use Google Translate to communicate,” Bhatia said. “I’d never experienced a group of people so internationally diverse.

“The verbal brainstorming phase, because of the language issues, wasn’t as productive as the design phase, where we could communicate through drawing,” he said. “Only then could we all get excited by the project, which was a unique process.”

Once the team tore down its own Tower of Babel, the real communication began through drawing what they had conceived — a version of Manhattan they titled “In Grid We Trust.” Archiprix rules required designs that followed three observations about the Big Apple in 2040: Sea levels would rise, cars would be banned from the island and skyscrapers would be passé.

“In Grid We Trust,” the product of a workshop led by Rice’s Neeraj Bhatia, divides the Manhattan of 2040 into “ecological pixels.”

Their answer was to partition Manhattan into a grouping of islands, and render the new void space as “ecological pixels.” The grid was reconceived as infrastructural armature to allow the ecological pixels to function with high efficiency, water control, energy harvesting, ecosystems and agriculture. The raised grid structure would provide living space and protection from the elements while integrating all the services that make a modern city operate, including transportation, data and water/sewer.

“These pixels are working in close proximity to each other and can do very different things only because of the walls of the grid that surround them,” Bhatia said. “The building becomes an infrastructural framework to activate the landscape.”

Bhatia wasn’t the only Rice representative at the prestigious competition. Benson Gillespie ’09, now a building envelope consultant at Israel Berger and Associates in New York, was RSA’s entry, taking part in a project titled “The Manhattan Promenades,” in which a slice of New York from Fifth Avenue to Queens becomes a museum of architectures past.

	NEERAJ BHATIA

Gillespie said that while the projects were enjoyable, the primary benefit to participating in the workshops was learning to communicate across cultural and language barriers.

“What I’d like to hope everybody in the group learned — and this is what I learned — is that we’re very much in a global profession,” he said. “People have very different design backgrounds, and each country stresses design in a different way.

“The real value was learning how to sit down at a table and convey an idea to nine people who have varying levels of understanding the language.”

Bhatia, who expressed gratitude to RSA and to Dean Sarah Whiting for supporting his participation in Archiprix, said he felt a little bad for his students. The team suffered through long hours in the studio to finish its project while all of Massachusetts celebrated the Boston Bruins’ Stanley Cup victory outside.

“The students were planted to their seats for the last 48 hours,” he recalled. “We all felt a little guilty, because they came from all over the world and wanted to see the city — and Boston was partying in the streets.

“But simultaneously they produced an amazing vision for the future of Manhattan and created a network of international colleagues who are getting equipped to face the future issues of urbanization.”