Project by Kentaro Komazawa
The Arab Cultural Museum reclaims the erased footprint of Little Syria on Washington Street by operating as a third-place infrastructure where Arab-American culture is not only preserved but actively disseminated. Situated in FiDi beside the last surviving Syrian tenement and St. George’s Church façade, the project responds to the disappearance of a once-vibrant enclave of peddlers, merchants, and community life. Using Raymond Williams’ definition of culture as both a “whole way of life” (informal/vernacular) and “forms of signification” (formal/intellectual), the architecture stages a gradient between street life and museum typology. A vertical street organizes circulation through a central void, using carved floor plates, shifts in elevation, and in-between moments of rest to connect formal galleries with informal markets and vendor spaces extending from ground to fifth floor. Sectional transitions allow floor, wall, and ceiling to fold into each other, producing choreographed continuity. The façade’s tapered spandrels and shifted plates reinforce the building’s lightweight steel expression and programmatic variety
