Wolfson Building
- Named after Sir Isaac Wolfson who funded the building in 1966.
-This structure was built for undergraduate students at Somerville College in Oxford, England.
- It was one of the first women’s colleges to be founded in Oxford, England.
- The college is located at the southern end of Woodstock Road, with Little Clarendon Street to the south and Walton Street to the west.
- Somerville College was converted into a hospital during World War I.
- It completes the enclosure of the Somerville’s large quad.
- Rooms face onto Watson St. and onto the quad.
- The staircases, located in the freestanding brick towers at each end of the block, form connections between the new concrete structure and its older neighbors.
- Each room has a very large singe-pane square window.
- The window projecting beyond the line of columns forms a lookout post and provides good light for the working wall that carries desks and bookshelves.
- The windows all reflect images of the other buildings located in the quad, bringing them all together.
- On the bottom floor of this building is the “Flora Anderson Hall” where many social events are held.
- Dorms hold events where people meet new friends.
- Living on campus creates a better sense of community and comfortability by seeing the same people each day.
- College campuses have everything you need within a small amount of land. There is food, lodging, social activities, clothing stores, and art supplies right on campus. You can stay in one place and still have everything you need.
- The dorms vibrant social life draws many students to it.
Grant Houses
-The project is located between Broadway and Morningside Avenue, spanning from 123rd Street/La Salle Street to 125th Street.
-The subways lines are 2 to 3 blocks away
-The bus lines are 1 to 2 blocks away
-General Ulysses S. Grant Houses in Manhattan consists of nine buildings, 13 and 21-stories tall with 1,940 apartments housing an estimated 4,519 residents. The 15.05-acre site was completed September 30, 1957 and is bordered by West 123rd and West 125th Streets, Morningside Avenue and Broadway.
-The complex, with the adjacent Morningside Houses, was completed in 1957.
-"At Grant Houses, for instance, 'bricks of mixed pink and buff' were added, with limited success, to break up the monotony of identical brick towers. The designers poorly integrated the colored bricks and they appear as an odd afterthought" (Bloom, 141).
-For maximum sunlight exposure the homes lie directly north of Morningside Gardens, which is a middle income cooperative in Morningside Heights.
-The New York Times noted the racial identification of the first five families to move into the Grant Houses, each from a different racial background.
-At Grant Houses, a few neighbors cared enough about the state of their community, their city and their environment to raise their recycling rate from zero to thirty percent. They've not only made it easy, they've made it possible for tenants here to do the right thing and recycle.
-Coming together for this single cause (to recycle)
-Different people living in one place (has same effect as a dorm)
-The garden project will primarily serve to provide low income grant housed residents access to nutritious and sustainable food.
-The garden project will increase interaction between the Grant Houses
-Lead to the cultivation of personal relationships between university students and Grant Houses residents, and helped to shape a collective vision
Works Cited
Bloom, Nicholas Dagen. Public Housing That Worked: New York in the Twentieth Century. University of Pennsylvania Press. Philadelphia 2008
Maxwell, Rober. New British Architecture. New York: Praeger, 1973. Print.
