Community and Time

Tasked with understanding the community surrounding Hudson Yards and the to-be refurbished HighLine in New York City, before any compelling renderings from real estate developers or diagrams from architects had been revealed, I approached the site from the 4th dimension and attempted to understand what role time played in the community. Benefiting from the industrial and low price nature of the immediate environs, the existing program of the neighborhood ranged from art galleries and dive bars to convention centers and strip clubs.

I took the stretched timeline of the 24 hour 365 life-cycle of the neighborhood, and attempted to hybridize and mutate its programs both through a notion of mash-up but also through a spatial organization that forced cross-pollination of events, demographics, and private / public space. The end result is a an iconic building that is meant to both willfully and serendipitously allow visitors with differing agendas to view, influence and be inspired by the tangential programs that intrude and display themselves to the visitor. One can be attending a symphony that is backdropped by a tai-chi class that is in turn voyeuristically on display to gallery patrons whom may run into a convention center boat-show off-site display, and wonder which is art, which is life, which is commerce and is this public space really open 24/7?