The Museum of Urban Form, Soho, NYC
Critic-Diana Agrest
for
role
status
year
The Cooper Union
Student
Project
1987
The project began with a series of studies of the fabrics of various cities to identify significant repressed or unconscious structures with the goal of making an architectural translation that could operate on the urban scale.
The site selected was a three-block strip of Houston Street, which included the adjacent blocks to the north and the south. This frame captured three urban conditions: at the center, the street, as edge, corridor and suture; to the north, the Radiant City model of the towers in the field of green, and at the south, the 19th Century uniform block grid.
The Museum of Urban Form was conceived as a network, in tripartite form, that extended across the site incorporating the existing urban artifacts and, by implication, the city beyond.
By submerging the roadway and reconstituting the street walls to the north and south, Houston Street was reconceived as a Gate; as void and public space which connecting two opposing urban fabric typologies. To the north, a series of Landscape elements were introduced between the towers, as an extension of the ground plane, to reconstitute an urban density at a new scale that engendered habitation. To the south, a series of Nodes were introduced, within the medium of the existing fabric, to define a new urban field condition. The particular strategies sought to create a diffuse and permeable boundary condition for the Museum of Urban Form in order to support a reading that the museum and city, in this case, were one.
