Block/Tower Prototype

Manhattan, NY
Winter 2012
Designer, under Stan Allen + Rafi Segal, with Matt McMahon
Stan Allen Architect
Speculative Design for Housing Exhibition

Invited to  speculate upon New York’s contemporary housing problems, Block/Tower proposes a strategic intervention to existing, under used office towers.  In lineage to Koolhaas’s Downtown Athletic Club, a multitude of programs are inserted into the generic office building, creating a vertically varied city, as if one rotated a typical New York City block into the sky.  To grant both publicness and a renew legibility to the interventions, a large open space spiral is carved through the tower, providing its myriad of different users shared open green space, hitherto a scare amenity in the city.