homes in the reeds
on the banks of muscota (harlem) river, this housing project seeks to reconcile itself with its place in the reeds (muscota, in the lenape language). it does so by embracing a multiplicity of perspective, the time it takes to make a drawing, what it entails to do it slowly, and the ways in which technologies ask our bodies to be used in different ways.
the conviction that labour and labourers should be treated with dignity runs through the project and its making — itself made in a collaboration between myself and ken hata-farris, beginning from a consideration of the labour of building and maintaining, as well as a reflection on our own labour in making the project, through drawing.
we understand housing as a site of reproductive labour, where domestic chores and caregiving take place typically outside the economic order. this disjunction between work, pay, and value is increasingly seen as a profitable opportunity by technological service sectors whose apps coded in the language of efficiency and optimization are changing the nature of housework. grocery delivery, caregiving, cleaning services, and more conveniently outsource reproductive labour to working class and poor communities while simultaneously pushing their homes and domestic needs further and further away from the city “centre;” that this paradigm is unsustainable is evident. the housing units, which are suspended above the ground floor volumes, propose to house those who work on and near the site.
resisting the self-contained positivism of past co-operative and luxury developments alike, this project does not seek to be a world unto itself. insistently urban, it instead relies on its surroundings and asks its neighbours for what it does not have. within 15 minutes of walking distance is a community garden, public library, theatre, community centre, museums, existing housing — all things to be in relation to. what this site does have is access to the river; the project therefore offers full, public access to the waterfront with a boat launch and storage and a laundromat–a reminder of two old, placespecific activities which have at their centre the body, and its maintenance and exercise outside of the realm of its commercial management or discipline.
the ground floor steps and ramps down along the sidewalk perimeter, and the areas closest to the street contain rooms for mail, refuse, and water management — three things which depend on city infrastructure, and are also supported by rainwater collection tanks with accessible spigots. a combination of paths and gardens planted with native plant species suitable to brackish and inundating habitats is comprised of graminoids, forbs, shrubs, ferns, vines, and trees, whose character is grassy, tousled, entwined.
the surfaces for walking on are made from a variety of reclaimed paving stones, which are dug into the earth and set by hand. they create a permeable surface which absorbs and physically filters water runoff, and allow the planting to breathe and move in a less rigid way. these softened boundaries reverse the mode of carving out space for planting from hardscape and instead engender a reciprocal relationship between people and their environment, which is repeated in the ground floor programme.
this includes public laundromats, a viewing platform, a heated exhibition space, a collective boat storage and launch, public restrooms, flexible heated spaces, garden and maintenance sheds, and a communal kitchen and table which provides a place to sit together and eat lunch. there are no corridors in the building, instead, there are an abundance of elevators and staircases, which serve the two adjacent units at every level. vertical neighbours, therefore, interact at a smaller-than-building scale. bringing some landscape up into the housing, the circulation cores are floored with tiles.
the units are all floor through, with planted balconies facing east to south bronx and winter gardens facing west to harlem river. the regularity of the structural grid, with its alternating pattern of 10 to 25 feet spans, affords the possibility for a variety of layout combinations, from studios to three bedrooms. in this way, a simple grid finds room for closets, nooks, and niches alongside a large, open central space.