Amenable Amenity
A Process of Reclamation
Golf courses are a quintessential manifestation of a way of conceptualizing land use that is dependent on willful artificiality and act as a vestige of a culture of predatory exclusivity.
Starting in the 1800s, in the Hudson Valley there was a shift in the relationship of humans to nature. The concept of land became re-articulated as landscape, and while neither was necessarily understood as wild, dynamics of power and control became paramount. Taking this as an entry point of curiosity, this project looks closely at ways that land is experienced. First by examining temporary stay (hotel) typologies that offer insight into architectural tropes as tools for framing nature and extracting value.
The first thesis drawing considers the psychographic landscape of commodification of the experience of ‘nature’ in dialogue with a physical reality of the landmass of the Catskills.
Notably, the Kaaterskill Hotel suggests that the experience of nature becomes one of a social ritual, where the veranda is the architectural tool that creates the opportunity to see and be seen, while nature provides a backdrop to this performative choreography.
Year - Spring 2023, GSAPP
Team - Instructor: Nahyun Hwang, Adjunct Assistant Professor, GSAPP
Project Location - Hudson Valley, NY
Exploring the relation of territory to capital flows and architectural tropes in hospitality as the mechanism for directing those flows.
The process to strip back, excavate, repurpose this condition constitutes a different relationship to land, and with it subvert attitudes of ownership, exclusivity and permanence.
Golf courses are a quintessential manifestation of a typology that is dependent on this willful artificiality as well as a vestige of a culture of social exclusivity. Over half of Hudson Valley golf courses are built on wetlands, denying these territories that offer essential ecological cornerstone by draining and filling. There is a complex ground condition reliant on layers of artificiality. This layered artificiality also extends to ways of seeing – remote digital occupation of this space via VR.
A manifestation of the colonial attitudes of flattening global variation and denying ecological and climate specificity of place. The Golf Course Club House is analogous to the model of a Summer home of wealthy New York Robber Barons looking for sanctuary from the sweltering heat of Summer urbanity and for a realm to socialize with other members of their social caste.
This project approaches reclamation as a catalytic process, one that is not controlled, but participated in. In this act, there is a transformation of the concept of mobility as aspirational and reserved for the upper classes (tourism) to one that is a necessary and an undeniable human need to seek sustenance – social, financial and cultural (transience).
This project approaches reclamation as a catalytic process, one that is not controlled, but participated in.
Considering multi-scalar reading of the golf course, from ground conditions to ecology, to chemical and architectural interventions.
This project reframes the golf course not as a leisure landscape, but as a contested ground condition to be unmade, studied, and reassembled.
By stripping back its layers of artificiality, from manicured surface to drained wetland, the proposal opens the possibility for a more reciprocal relationship between land, ecology, and inhabitation. Reclamation becomes less an act of repair imposed from above than a process of participation: one that accepts instability, invites ecological succession, and transforms amenity from an exclusive form of escape into a shared infrastructure for renewal.
