Year: 2018
Location: New York, NY

Drawing produced for form in rem, a collective investigation curated by citygroup

Manhattan used to be a place populated by residential hotels, from the Bowery’s inimitable Palace to the myriad single-occupancy hotels (SROs) once found throughout the city. However, starting at the beginning of the 20th century "opinion makers saw residential hotels as caldrons of social and cultural evil"¹ directly responsible for urban blight and crime. This system of beliefs ultimately led to the enforcement of new policies forbidding residential hotels in the city in order to foster the creation of domestic spaces more suited to the structure of single families: fully privatized homes with less social mixture within the building. The policy makers responsible for such legislature claimed that this would turn New York City into a clean, modernized city. A century later, this pursuit of orderliness has created a paradise of sorts for luxury developers, real estate speculators, and the happy few who can afford their seemingly endless supply of condos. This is without mentioning the misleading abundance of co-ops that in reality have nothing to do with cooperative, communal living, but rather the union of landlords protecting the social and cultural homogeneity of cities through conservative boards and stringent (many argue arbitrary) screening processes for tenants. In recent years, though, we've seen the emergence of new subjects who do not conform to this mode of living and would instead prefer to live with others in order to share the load of domestic and affective labor. From digital nomads to retired widows, these new subjects should be able to live in domestic spaces structured for their needs. Instead, such individuals are forced to retrofit housing stock originally designed for nuclear families, which often undermines the community they seek to establish from the beginning due to spatial and legal constraints.

Rethinking One Manhattan Square within this context, existing walls, structure, and circulation cores are removed. The plan is then restructured by a cardo and decumanus of living, reappropriating the historical Roman urban layout for collective inhabitation. Oriented along the north-south axis are the primary, shared functions associated with bathing and waste removal (pools, showers, and toilets). The east-west axis of the decumanus are services essential for cooking, cleaning, and vertical circulation. By condensing these necessary functions into two axes focused on communal programs, the remaining floor space is liberated from rigid or predefined parcelization. Within this area, moveable partition systems and storage cabinets occurring on a regular grid are inserted. Private space becomes a constantly negotiated, everchanging territory based on the needs of the community. Ultimately, this plan provides an alternative structure to shape the way one lives, which greatly focuses on activities that bring people together like bathing or cooking. Dedicated personal space is minimized and impermanent in order to accommodate large-scale communal activities within a densely populated plan.

¹ Paul Groth, Living Downtown: The History of Residential Hotels in the United States (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 202.

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