Project by Claire Wolsk

New York’s history of policing lawful dissent, through mitigation of privately owned public spaces, corruption inherent in the scaffolding industry, and the addition of mechanisms of surveillance and silence, in substitution for concrete investments in communities’ futures, demands a reality where rights must be continuously defended. The density of surveillance mechanisms, as identified through larger contextual studies along St. Nicholas Avenue, indicates the discrepancy of the state’s duty to protect and the execution of sanctioned “safety” initiatives.

This project offers two principle counter-gravitational forces; the insertion of a double facade, utilizing scaffolding as a structural and theoretical framework, and the inversion of the sacred and profane at the site of St. Luke’s Episcopal Church on 141st and Convent avenue. The double facade intends to disrupt the status quo of civilian movement through scaffolding structures, both critiquing them as a corrupt financial mechanism, and as a physical symbol of social and political neglect. Double facade modules will refer to permanent and materialized civic dwellings, whose materiality and intentionality preserves civic liberties. Interstitial spaces, that encompass what is identified as the ultrasonic semitones of Harlem Lane, demarcate the potential for an archive of civic resistance, where assemblage persists despite attempts to codify and manipulate. Resistance is materialized in the construction of double-facade modules offering permanent occupations of the public domain in pursuit of “a once and future Harlem Lane.” At St. Luke’s Episcopal Church, the inversion of the sacred and profane, resists the commodification of religious architecture and the extractive logic of pharmaceutical capitalism. The previous material elements of the sacred and exterior of St. Luke’s Episcopal Church, reintegrates into the central profane, offering itself to structurally support a new material language of technology, hard edges, and highly specialized equipment intended to facilitate alternative medicinal practices. The church’s exterior and interior, now inverted through the desacralization of traditionally sacred spatial and physical elements, operate respectively as public gathering spaces intended to reinsert the human into the greater ecosystem, and “PLANT-ETARY” medicinal laboratories and gardens intended to insert care, healing, and future-oriented plant knowledge and examination as counter-gravitational forces against abandonment and market-driven repurposing.