This website uses cookies as well as similar tools and technologies to understand visitors' experiences. By continuing to use this website, you consent to Columbia University's usage of cookies and similar technologies, in accordance with the Columbia University Website Cookie Notice
Donna Haraway in her lecture Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene states that “we require each other in unexpected collaborations and combinations, in hot compost piles. We become with each other, or not at all.” Breathe Again envisions a future in Manhattan if we grew with one another across different species, and how diverse and complex narratives may evolve in accordance with our inevitably changing climate. The project, based in Chinatown’s Manhattan, investigates systems that render a physically built environment and mines these realities for unique conditions of care and kinship: A system of collective ownership represented in the association building typology when interrogated reveals complex familial and intergenerational dynamics; a robust produce market is built on relationships requiring deep trust between farmers, wholesalers and vendors; a model for ventilation in a humid tropical climate fundamentally changes the programmatic profile of spaces that exist in a typical tenement building. Breathe Again is presented over a timeline of 75 years designed to represent care as a collective assemblage.