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
...
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.