Starting as a study to identify “ruined sites” in Staten Island, areas that have been neglected and disused broadly. My partner and I identified the old pre-World War I costal defenses on the island as promising.
These large early concrete structures portrayed heroic forms whose meaning has long since been forgotten. Upon investigation, we found these large infrastructural investments themselves quickly became obsolete. Most if not all the the coastal defenses of Staten Island fell out out of service long before the onset of World War II despite the immense effort to construct them.
Using the Islamic Law concept of a “Waqf”, which dedicates a property to a cause in perpetuity, these long-abandoned structures are given new life as places of worship for the commuting Muslim community of New York.
The Waqf for this project spreads across this project and my colleague’s explorations as well. The project as displayed is one-half of a larger project, the other half can be found under Disarming Defenses: Tower for One.
