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Andres Alvarez-Davila

Andres Alvarez-Davila

New York, NY, US

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Section through common rooms in the Refectory The combined influence of the interior landscapes, rammed earth walls, mounds, and the vaults would, coupled with the concatenation of interior and exterior spaces, create a dynamic environment that produces atmospherically diverse effects—the complete opposite of the alienating, hermetically sealed facility which is the norm in large scale cannabis
Section through common rooms in the Refectory
The combined influence of the interior landscapes, rammed earth walls, mounds, and the vaults would, coupled with the concatenation of interior and exterior spaces, create a dynamic environment that produces atmospherically diverse effects—the complete opposite of the alienating, hermetically sealed facility which is the norm in large scale cannabis
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Cannabis Commune

Stringent safety regulations, the drive for maximum productivity, and pre-existing bodies of knowledge have resulted in the creation of a new typology—the cannabis cultivation park, a permutation of the office park exemplified in the derelict IBM Kingston campus. Despite cyclical changes in the economy, individual industries and land use, a data-centric, corporatized epistemology is instantiated in both the obsolescent architecture of IBM’s abandoned campuses  and in the emerging cannabis cultivation facilities. In response to these spatial practices and structural inequities in the nascent cannabis industry, we propose the creation of a new typology and a new form of organization: a co-cooperative model that will also provide vocational and educational programs for people formerly incarcerated for possession of marijuana.

More than a set of buildings, we call for an expansive process of vaccination, remediation, construction, cultivation, and rewilding that becomes an alternative to current modes of production. The project accomplishes this in two principal ways: first, by remediating the former IBM site in Kingston, reversing the pollution from the ruins of this corporate landscape; second, by redressing past wrongs and allowing minority populations affected by the “war on drugs” active participation in the ethical production of cannabis. The remediation processes that accompany the production of cannabis provides the building blocks for the proposed landscape and architecture. 

In the very distant future, a clean site, which will have allowed the production of cannabis for many years, will return to nature in the form of a ruin. In essence, we propose a paradigm of production that, rather than extend racist practices and extractive logics, predicated on models of infinite growth, also becomes a generator of justice and an ecologically productive part of the environment, inherently limited in space by the confines of past industry and temporally by natural cycles of healing and growth.

 
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Status: School Project
Location: Columbia GSAPP
Additional Credits: Completed in partnership with Zakios Meghrouni-Brown & Jules Kleitman

 
Greenhouses Section Greenhouses will be underground structures. Cannabis on the exterior, which remediates the biopiles, is left to grow in a less controlled way, but can still have economic value for industrial applications. The earth functions as a thermal mass. As time passes, the remediating plants on the exterior will grow, until the entire site is overtaken.
Greenhouses Section
Greenhouses will be underground structures. Cannabis on the exterior, which remediates the biopiles, is left to grow in a less controlled way, but can still have economic value for industrial applications. The earth functions as a thermal mass. As time passes, the remediating plants on the exterior will grow, until the entire site is overtaken.
Floorplan of Incubator Incubator includes educational spaces—a library, offices, a conference room, and a classroom—as part of the proposed cannabis commune’s social mandate.
Floorplan of Incubator
Incubator includes educational spaces—a library, offices, a conference room, and a classroom—as part of the proposed cannabis commune’s social mandate.
View of Incubator The mounded landscape crosses the threshold between interior and exterior, collapsing, even at the human scale, the strict dichotomy between the natural world and artificial worlds of production.
View of Incubator
The mounded landscape crosses the threshold between interior and exterior, collapsing, even at the human scale, the strict dichotomy between the natural world and artificial worlds of production.
Process Earth is excavated and cleaned as an extension of ongoing remediation processes. Concurrently, rammed earth walls are built to house greenhouses & dispersed programs. Excavated earth is then bermed around these walls. A mesh is installed in the greenhouses. Hemp, an ideal plant for bioremediation, is planted on the bermed hills, while cannabis for human consumption is grown inside the resulting greenhouses. Programed space is vaulted over. Once fallowed, the mesh and earth-work...
Process
Earth is excavated and cleaned as an extension of ongoing remediation processes. Concurrently, rammed earth walls are built to house greenhouses & dispersed programs. Excavated earth is then bermed around these walls. A mesh is installed in the greenhouses.
Hemp, an ideal plant for bioremediation, is planted on the bermed hills, while cannabis for human consumption is grown inside the resulting greenhouses.
Programed space is vaulted over. Once fallowed, the mesh and earth-work landscape disintegrates and becomes overgrown, merging with the surrounding environment.