The site demands that our approach to housing considers the cycles and spaces, outside of the home, that mediate more normative understandings of housing as a private home: a passing trash train and a late night TV show, the ebbs and flows of tides, and of a lifetime in a home. With attention pulled in so many directions, but within such structured regularity, transitions become blurred. Is it possible to lean further into this blurring, inverting familiar typologies in new syntactic assemblages—that is, spatially, sonically, photically—to define an approach to housing?
The project consists in 425 residential units, all accessible, and a fully self-sufficient insertion onto the site. The buildings sit in stasis, designed for repeatability and affordability, each implementing the same structural approach, only varying in length or height. This allows for the allocation of funds elsewhere, towards the verbal, the experimental and infrastructural, in expanding a central appropriated highway flyover as a spine, a network of access and program. Specific gestures allow for a transition from the urban public to the private home along blurred and overlapping transitions: from the subway to the living room, one designation flows fluidly and progressively into the next.“
