SITE

PORT OF NEW ORLEANS > NEW ORLEANS, LOUISIANA

Located in southeast Louisiana near the mouth of the Mississippi River, the Port of New Orleans serves as a gateway linking America to the global market. New Orleans has been a center for international trade since it was founded by the French in 1718.

Today, the Port of New Orleans is at the center of the world’s busiest port complex, Louisiana’s Lower Mississippi River. Proximity to the American Midwest via a 14,500 mile inland waterway system positions the Port of New Orleans as the port of choice for the movement of cargo such as steel, grain, containers and manufactured goods.  The port is also at a pivotal location for passenger terminals which fuels the tourism economy and makes it gateway for international travel. 

ERATO STREET CRUISE TERMINAL > PORT OF NEW ORLEANS

For the Quarantine Unit we will be working with the Erato Street Cruise Terminal.  Excerpts from the New Orleans Port Directory describing the general information about the site and port can be found here:  PORT OF NEW ORLEANS

VECTOR MODELS

For your last five spatial models this week, focus on the lines of movement within your quarantine unit.  These will be vector models and should diagram the spatial conditions of human movement, air circulation, water circulation, light circulation, sound reverberation, and any other forms of movement particularly important to your design.            

A QUARANTINE UNIT

“someone who is quarantined is different from someone who is isolated. Quarantined people aren’t sick; they’re people who may get sick. They’re people who have been exposed to a disease but who are not physically ill.”
- Dr. Georges Benjamin, Executive Director of the American Public Health Association

Choose one of the disaster scenarios described below and design a prototype quarantine unit for one person to be located at the Erato Street Cruise Terminal. Analyze the spatial relationships between the components for survival [PROJECT 1b] and the effects of infection [PROJECT 1a] and strategically design a unit that accommodates or restructures the discovered information.


PREVENTIVE SCENERIO:
You have just returned from a cruise vacation in the Caribbean and upon docking at the Port of New Orleans you have been informed that you are a suspected transmitter. In your travels you have been exposed to [INSERT DISASTER AGENT HERE] and now could be a potential carrier. You must be quarantined – 40 days of isolation and monitoring.


PROTECTIVE SCENERIO:
You have just returned from a cruise vacation in the Caribbean and upon docking at the Port of New Orleans you have been informed that the City of New Orleans has been struck by [INSERT DISASTER AGENT HERE]. In order to protect yourself from the outbreak you must be quarantined – 40 days of isolation and monitoring.

The entire project brief can be found here:
 ASSIGNMENT 2b: A Quarantine Unit 

PROJECT 2a : ISOLATION SPACES

This short assignment involves researching and diagramming revolutionary precedents for dwelling in relation to historical case studies for quarantine/containment/isolation. Select from a research matrix of architectural houses vs. quarantine facilities one house and one institution of quarantine/containment and diagram the differences or similarities between the two. Diagrams should analyze spatial organization, private versus public, isolation versus collective, solid versus void, thickness versus thinness, control versus freedom, light versus dark, etc.

The project brief can be found here: PROJECT 2a

A good historical outline of architectural houses can be found here: Kipnis_Houses Lecture.  This is a video of a lecture given by architecture critic and historian Jeffrey Kipnis at Ohio State University.

HISTORY OF QUARANTINE

Moving beyond quarantine at the scale of the human body we will now begin to investigate spatial and architectural conditions of quarantine.

"The practice of quarantine—the separation of the diseased from the healthy—has been around a long time. As early as the writing of the Old Testament, for instance, rules existed for isolating lepers. It wasn't until the Black Death of the 14th century, however, that Venice established the first formal system of quarantine, requiring ships to lay at anchor for 40 days before landing. ("Quarantine" comes from the Latin for forty.) The Venetian model held sway until the discovery in the late 1800s that germs cause disease, after which health officials began tailoring quarantines with individual microbes in mind. In the mid-20th century, the advent of antibiotics and routine vaccinations made large-scale quarantines a thing of the past, but today bioterrorism and newly emergent diseases like SARS threaten to resurrect the age-old custom, potentially on the scale of entire cities. In this time line, follow the evolution of quarantine, from Roman times to the present."  -Peter Tyson

Here are a series of short PDF's that outline the history of Quarantine:
CDC_History of Quarantine
History of Quarantine_Timeline
Quarantine Stations Fact Sheet
Quarantine and Isolation

DIAGRAMMING INFORMATION

We will now start looking at methods for mapping and diagramming information.  This will begin with  ASSIGNMENT_1b in which you have begun to map your daily survival routines and lead into a larger site analysis.  Thus, we will begin to look at examples and methods for mapping, surveying, and graphically representing data.  The first reading we will discuss is Stan Allen's  Diagrams Matter.  In conjunction with this reading listen to this episode from This American Life: Mapping

[ A map of phone, cable, and power lines. Image by Denis Wood ]