Site Analysis

This is my own analysis of my site on the Boston Harbor Waterfront

This analytical drawing is of how I see the waterfront edge conditions. The wharfs are in BLACK and the building edges are in RED. Looking at the history of the site I realized that the wharfs have gotten larger and more spread out. The building edge has become more uniform but still very formative around the water.

The wharfs are very bold and intersect the water as a force to be reckoned with. The buildings try to follow suite to where the water is, almost try to blend in with the water.

This circulation analysis shows how boats, vehicles, and people move about the site. After looking at the documentation I produced of the circulation paths I noticed some characteristics of each circulation kind. Boat traffic is shown in RED, Vehicular traffic is in GREEN, and Pedestrian traffic is in BLUE.

Boat traffic a definite path. This is due to the fact that most of the larger ships have to stay mostly in the middle of the harbor because that is where it is deepest. Coming out of the main pathway are "fingers" of boat paths that smaller boats can use to go to a dock or wharf. The water is an open source so there isn't a road that boats have to follow but there are areas where boats can not go because it is too shallow or restricted for other reasons.

The Vehicular traffic is interesting because it stays mostly in a grid like pattern. there are areas where roads fray from the grid but the busiest roads are in grid form. Cars must stay on the rods so the green lines were meant to show precise and distinct direction of vehicular circulation.

Pedestrian circulation was the hardest to analyze. There are main pedestrian paths that are busy but people don't have to stick to the sidewalks in this area. There are a lot of open spaces here that people use as shortcuts or to cut corners. Pedestrian lines are sporadic and go pretty much everywhere, except in the water of course. The water acts as the only natural boundary for pedestrian circulation.

This is an analysis of the layers that I see on the site. Boston has a very important Sea wall that contains all the fill that was placed into the harbor, if the sea wall wasn't there the fill would erode into the harbor. There are many layers to the sea wall, it has been built and rebuilt over the years as Boston's land expands out into the harbor. This drawings is meant to show how the wall is made of layers, some more dense than others.

Analytical model of the site