Unite Commensal

The housing project is situated in East Harlem, in a decidedly challenging site bounded by East 131st St, Park Avenue and the Metro-North viaduct, and Harlem River Drive. Despite its location in an economically barren neighborhood and its status as a by-passed edge fragment of the city grid, the site possesses the exciting potential to respond to several of the Bloomberg administration’s urban initiatives and reconnect to the urban fabric in a meaningful way. The project explores the East Harlem site as a new urban node – a vibrant destination combining density with diversity in mixed-use programming (mixed-income housing, commercial, retail, community and health) as well as as a connective infrastructure between city and waterfront. 365 000 ft2 of development consists of 400 residential units with 97 500 ft2 of blended community, retail and commercial space. As the project seeks to foster community, wider than usual corridors and public nodes among the residences creates a building efficiency of approximately 23%. The project posits that building can be a responsive, revitalizing social act in an of itself, using digital fabrication processes to create a highly customizable ‘kit of parts’ that can be crafted, assembled and mounted locally, employing and training a number of unspecialized local workers in the process. Further, the de-mountability of the system enables a high degree of changeability and reusability. As an active participant in the social, cultural and economic livelihood of the area, the building becomes a temporal entity responding to the needs of a changing demographic and to the evolution of ‘the city that is’.