Winter 2021
Honorable Mention for Arch Out Loud’s Home 2021 Competition
The Bronx Culture Container is an initiative that reassesses the dual problems of affordable housing and cultural production in New York City. The project, simultaneously a housing system that can be replicated elsewhere and a site-specific counterproposal to the City’s transition from a locus of cultural production to one of cultural consumption, utilizes typologies of housing (co-living, live-work spaces, studios, etc.) combined with cultural spaces to instigate a commoning of arts programming. The project thus serves as a model for collective living that is integrated into the cultural milieu of the Bronx and Upper Manhattan.
Situated adjacent to the Bronx Documentary Center, the Culture Container juxtaposes housing typologies (towers, courtyard housing, etc.) to create idiosyncratic moments that imbue variety and complexity into forms created by repeated, modular units. The form and organization of these units result from a reexamination of their internal logics and the redistribution of their internal programming (kitchens, dining and living areas) to larger, collective spaces that are meant to be shared between inhabitants. The intention of this redistribution is to simultaneously create greater housing density in the stressed housing fabric of New York City while creating a new cultural commons while simultaneously producing truly “public” housing.
