TOWER IN THE PARK: NEW YORK CITY
The Martin Luther King Houses are remnants of a bygone era of government-sponsored mass housing projects. Currently, individual towers stand among underutilized green spaces and narrow circulation corridors.
My proposal for this project is the insertion of a series of prosthetic buildings that attach themselves to the existing volumes. These buildings could not exist on their own; but as interventions they attain the necessary structural, circulatory, and developmental logics to provide new types of density and open space for the site. The project is called “Treehousing,” largely because the proposal takes the form of a tree, consisting of cores and branches.
The cores provide circulation and a series of micro-units; 350 square foot studio apartment now being pursued by the city of New York as a means of increasing density and accommodating young people who move to the city. The branches also provide a series of new unit types; live-work studios, multifamily townhouses, and retail spaces at the ground levels, and at upper levels standard apartments, skip-stop 1 and 2 bedroom apartments, and accessory units that attach to units in the existing buildings to allow intergenerational living while maintaining privacy. The branches also create new types of open space: semiprivate terraces accessible by both the building residents. These outdoor spaces are coupled with adjacent semi-private indoor spaces such as a fitness center, library, or community room.
