Friday, September 22, 2017
The NYC Option Design Studio course is an integral part of the program experience. Taught by various local architects over the years, the curriculum offers a unique opportunity to learn from a practicing architect and to live (in my case) in view of your site.
The LIGHT + LABOR Option Studio is led by Stella Betts with David Leven of LEVENBETTS. The studio is an intense analysis of the environmental relationship between the worker and their built environment. On one particular Friday, we rode the ferry upstream to Queens and spent the day visiting our site (the vacant lot of Empire City Iron Works) and the surrounding dynamic context of Long Island City, Queens.
The itinerary included the former factory at the Noguchi Museum, the artist/maker space of Socrates Sculpture Park, an ivy-covered brick manufacturing building where Plant Specialists is based, and finally Murray Playground. Along the way, we were encouraged to find an “obsession.” I was drawn to hose connections. Later, I would realize that these standpipes would summarize my design concept: a way for individual buildings to plug into a shared resource in a manufacturing collective.
