Project by I Lok U
‘Inhabiting Manhattan Schists’ brings the quarry into the city by engaging Manhattan’s overlooked schist outcrops. The presence of schists has played a significant role in the city’s terrain, skyline, nature, and infrastructure, yet modern construction favors imported luxury stone as a form of cladding, undermining the structural and sustainable capabilities of local stone. The project reclaims an outcrop as both extraction site and construction ground, eliminating the need for material transport and reducing carbon emissions. Through embracing low-tech, low-impact methods with stone, such as feather and wedge stone splitting, dry stone stacking, and traditional stone carving, the work redefines what “extraction” means in the urban context: not only removing stone but transforming it into a cycle of building, inhabiting, and memory. This approach embraces endogeneity, reframing geology and cultural history as drivers of sustainable, inhabitable design.
