As the longline technology became obsolete and the nuclear threat disappeared, the fortress-like and windowless AT&T Longline Building lost the purpose it was initially designed for. What is left are a series of strangely layout floor plates concealed within opaque walls filled with an unnecessarily excessive amount of materials. Instead of tearing down unwanted parts and sending them into waste piles, we see the building’s opaque and thick walls that are now void of purpose as a quarry where most materials for adaptive reuse are sourced. A careful deconstruction that disassembles the structure into basic material units will take place while dense layers of scaffolding provide space for interactions between labor and materials. Materials that compose the facade, then, are collapsed into the interior of the building or expanded outward and form new spaces. The process of unfinishing a finished brutalist sculpture transforms the building into a vessel for social infrastructure and housing for a new era.
