This project is located along the edge of Morningside Park, the result of hundreds of millions of years of geological revolution, wherein rocks convulsed, collided, and twisted under intense pressure and heat and were later worn down and carved by melting glaciers; a geological divide reproduced in a racialized socioeconomic divide between Morningside Heights and Harlem. A steel frame apparatus is inserted in overlook towers designed by Frederick Law Olmsted, altering the vertical threshold by way of landings, platforms, and stairs which at night transform into a club. While city infrastructure is concealed by inconspicuous devices such as manhole covers, the necessity of maintenance or events such as floods subvert the infra-structural ethos by delineating what is otherwise invisible. Confronting this insistence of matter and energy is the goal of this project. Like the bubbling overflow of a storm drain during a flood, these containers emit the sounds of stomping on stairs, singing voices, and amplified music during a rave. Where the hegemonic Western ontology and episteme categorically represses the bodily and emotional in favor of the rational, translated into a particularly behaved architecture, this project seeks to embrace the familiar, if underground, bodily catharsis of a night at the club.
