Graft: Inhabiting the city's edge.

摘要

This thesis proposes a housing development for the waterfront in Halifax, Nova Scotia. The site is a piece of waterfront property that is currently used for surface parking. South of the site is an existing residential development, Bishop's Landing, and to the west lies one of the city's preeminent civic institutions, the weekly farmer's market.; Like many other North American port cities, Halifax has a postindustrial waterfront that exists as an in-between zone. Through urban renewal projects and thoughtless traffic engineering, port cities find themselves severed from their harbours. The waterfront becomes as a vestigial organ, severed from the body of the city.; Given the amputated or disconnected nature of the waterfront, the proposed housing is presented with the challenge of a difficult connection to the body of the city. The notion of connectedness is one of paramount importance in the design of housing and for that reason, the thesis employs the metaphor of the graft to describe the linking of the city to the water, as well as the linking of the future residents of the project to the greater fabric of the city.; A graft is a medical procedure wherein a piece of living tissue is shaped and placed into the afflicted area to serve as a catalyst for healing. In this regard, the project is conceived as a living piece of the city: a community across which the city and water knit themselves together.; The study of anatomy or, perhaps more appropriately, functional anatomy deals in broad terms with the form and function of parts and their relation to the greater functioning whole. This thesis attempts an architecture which considers the proposed housing as embodying an anatomy composed of parts articulated around shared spaces. These shared spaces embody the energy of this knitting together by providing places for meeting at the civic as well as the individual scale.