This project proposes the adaptive reuse of the Red Hook Grain Terminal as a mesocosmic civic infrastructure: an open-ended scaffold for environmental repair, public life, and interspecies cohabitation. Drawing from Eugene Odum’s theory of the mesocosm—a bounded but evolving ecological system—the design reframes the 1922 silo array as a porous regulatory field for air, water, publics, and climate.[1]

Architecture and ecology are layered across section. The sixth floor operates as the primary rainwater catchment surface, directing water into the fourth floor, where a ten-foot-deep engineered soilbed supports intermixing across plant, fungal, and microbial communities. This stratum functions as both growing medium and graywater filtration zone, bio-integrated into the building’s reuse systems.

Porosity is stratified and seasonal. Calibrated voids allow migratory birds, heat plumes, spores, vines, and tidal air to pass through former grain silos. Passive solar and hydrological systems respond to solstices and equinoxes, forming microclimates that shift with the year. Select silos host vertical wetlands, compost columns, and dew-fed mycelial chambers. Four structurally reinforced silos anchor the retrofit: three contain elevator and stair cores, while a fourth—centrally located and programmatically unassigned—functions as the building’s hydrological and metabolic manifold. Graywater, ventilation, and nutrient systems pass through this core and emerge visibly along the ramps.

Spiraling around the perimeter, this structural ramp maintains a low slope that allows for continuous accessibility and intermittent views. Each segment operates as a slow-moving vantage: offering moments of pause, climate exposure, and encounter, while also functioning as an infrastructural armature for ventilation, irrigation, and pedestrian flow. Linking Brooklyn Bridge Park with inland Red Hook, the ramp enables multiple scales of circulation: pedestrian, pollinator, and atmospheric, knitting the condenser into broader urban and ecological networks. As it ascends, it interfaces with a sequence of embedded zones: wetland silos, compost cores, graywater beds, and classrooms, linking them not as isolated programs but as nodes within a continuous ecological and civic metabolism.

“Rest, reuse, repair” unfold across species and substrates. “Rest” is afforded through shaded courtyards, moss-lined ruins, amphibian wetlands, and floodable floors: spaces where humans find cool relief, mussels filter sediment, and the land slows and absorbs. “Reuse” includes structural salvaging and circular economies: silos become aquifer tanks, myco-compost vessels, and graywater gardens. “Repair” emerges incrementally: mussel beds filter runoff; wind chimneys ventilate classrooms; a fungal root zone metabolizes waste. The terminal becomes not an object but an ecological protocol.

The design draws from São Paulo’s SESC projects including Lina Bo Bardi’s Pompéia Factory, as well as the Soviet social condenser, extending their logics to post-human context. Rather than serve discrete programs, it performs as a spatial condenser of ecological, atmospheric, and communal processes. As Anna Bokov writes, the social condenser is not a typology but a relational diagram: dissolving boundaries across use, class, and scale.[2]

That logic now extends to multispecies actors and planetary systems. In doing so, the project redefines the figure of the worker: no longer confined to the industrial subject of collectivism, labor is reframed as metabolic participation—dispersed across fungi, filters, kitchen stewards, microbial decomposers, and the building’s own porous infrastructures. But like its Soviet antecedents, the condenser remains pedagogical: it teaches not through instruction but through entanglement—by staging spaces where bodies, climates, and species cohabitate, sense, and respond. In this way, humans learn to inhabit infrastructural systems not as users, but as participants in an extended ecology of maintenance and reciprocity.

Ultimately, the project offers not a fixed solution but a porous, adaptive system—attuned to climate volatility and capable of holding publics, water, decay, and time.

References: [1] Eugene Odum, Fundamentals of Ecology, 3rd ed. (Philadelphia: W. B. Saunders, 1971); see also Christopher Jacobs and Louise Utting, “Notes on a Mesocosmic Architecture,” Log 60 (2023): 42–53. [2] Anna Bokov, Lessons from the Social Condensers: 101 Soviet Workers’ Clubs and Spaces for Mass Assembly (Zurich: gta Verlag, 2023).