Completed in 1972, Paul Rudolph’s Tracey Towers stand as monumental expressions of late modernist housing in the Bronx. Conceived as part of a larger urban renewal effort, the project originally included 36 low-rise townhouses embedded within a stepped plinth, designed to soften the scale of the towers and bring housing down to the street. This base was meant to mediate between the verticality of the towers and the surrounding neighborhood, offering a more grounded, human-scaled experience of the city.
Yet this critical component was never built. The townhouses, which might have provided an alternative mode of living within the complex, remain an unrealized layer of Rudolph’s architectural vision.
Our project returns to the plinth not as a blank base, but as a site of architectural memory and urban potential. We propose a new interpretation of the original townhouse concept, one that responds to today’s Bronx: a borough shaped by resilience, intergenerational living, and shifting housing needs. In reviving Rudolph’s unbuilt vision, the project becomes both a continuation and a critique, a dialogue between past ambitions and present conditions.
