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︎GONEferal

  F2018


But are you satisfied with your existing conditions?


There’s never going to be enough housing in New York.


Zoning is the language of the physical city.


Density as comprimise


How do you create trust without saying it?


Impending verticality


Scale within a scale



Interstice - an intervening space – a small or narrow space or interval between things or parts, especially when one of a series of alternating uniform spaces and parts


To embody and idea vs representation of the thing


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NYC Block 1617 is in constant flux, a shifting power dynamic between the city and the community.

This land has been razed, stripped, sold, fenced off, fumigated…and yet still it persists as a center of community life, its endurance a testament to its necessity.

The Harlem community was insurgent, rebellious, seized and took over this land, and in doing so they not only brought back life, but inspired growth.


This project is about the feral; the process of invasion and resurgence, the establishment of spaces that are inherently non-co-optable because of their scale, calculated adjacencies / unique placement, and formal implications.  Only in thatspace can that program live, and these are specialized spaces and programs at risk of being phased out by imminent large-scale development.


There is a the constant tension between the inevitable extrusion of the city’s ground, the high-rise development and ‘flexible,’ ‘modular’ big-box, and the hyper-specialized and local spaces which persist; the anti-development, the contextual, the cozy. 

The feral resistance, and their programs necessitate feral spaces of not only resistance, but mere presence, of validity and the right to space, of expression of context and spirit of community.


The project investigates how these two forces meet spatially, and how they compromise, or refuse to.

Formalizing this process of takeover, it is a search to understand how the feral can dominate the vertical extrusions, when so often it is the other way around. 


The feral field intertwines with the extruded field, and responds to the breaks within its continuity, eating into and eroding the edges that divide the two fields, blurring boundaries and creating a melted but contentious edge of fusion where the spaces intersect, engage, respond, and yield to one another.

Acknowledgment of one another, reaction and compromise, but the feral always creeps and creates cracks as it states its right to grow.


These spaces are for them, and they cannot be co-opted.


Mark