Sheared Seam: Arthouse-Greenhouse

Governor’s Island, New York
Fall 2012 / RSA Semester 5.1
Professor Troy Schaum
Comprehensive Design

The most interesting part of Governor’s Island, located just off the coast of Manhattan Island in New York, is a string of houses called Colonel’s Row. This line marks a typological seam of many dualities: between the original island and the appendage, the once natural and the artificial, the domestic and the institutional, Liggett Hall’s architectural frontality and Fort Jay’s landscaped horizontality. Substituting one of the existing duplex houses, this project expresses these moments of “shear at the seam” by juxtaposing two formal volumes rotated against each other.  Intertwining these two volumes is a helix-like composition of two programs: artist studios and gardens.