morphing

re-mixing residential programmes utilizing properties of pre-war buildings

With a ubiquitous density of Neo-Classical buildings on Broadway from w 87th to w 120th, I was set on distorting and disempowering the equally present painful iconography peppered on these buildings while designing a way for people to make more of the premium these buildings exclude — and always excluded — specific communities from: space; both living space and public space. 

As Pre-War building windows were mostly standardized in their sizing, I employ them to hack – and let people hack – their building façades by deploying different forms that attach into their windows. Here, these ‘pods’ utilize ergonomics, common non-ergonomic motions, and perception-based parallax projection system, projecting users’ perception activities within the forms’ interfaces, while maintaining material transparency so as not to lose the window.

By maintaining the material transparency here, these ‘pods’ distort Neo-Classical notions of sublimity and generate a new hyper-real public space, whereby inhabitants may experience new sets of public — or intimate — conditions and interactions between inhabitants, and between inhabitants and city-dwellers, dwelling down below.

With these ‘pods’, or ‘morphologies’, people could be empowered to act on the space they inhabit; by cutting into / transforming existing programmes, or even making new programmes, they may finally make space for themselves that they otherwise never could.