Chinatown Library/Vertical Farm

The studio called for a library in an existing site in chinatown, NY. The existing site was meant to house a new research library, holding rare documents from the history of tenement buildings in New York. The existing site was also home to a prominent food market that was meant to be bulldozed for our library. In my project I decided to treat this market as essential to the success of the libraries site integration and formal relationships. The resulting library created a new large food market place and created a spiraling vertical garden on the edge of the building. 1000 linear feet of planters could house fresh fruits and vegetables to be sold in the ground floor marketplace and also to feed the community. While the interior of the library interfaced with the exterior planting space through a series of spatial intersections and custom armatures to create interaction with between workers planting the edge of the building and researchers studying rare documents. The culmination of this design was a rooftop space where the public and planting spaces came inside (through spatial intersection) and the books reading spaces were able to come outside. This lead to a rearrangement of public and private programs, while still charged with those programs benefits. Giving a farm worker a chance to engage with rare documents and a researcher to engage with the culture and benefit of community farming. The way that a library is a catalog of information, the market and vertical farm is a catalog of culture, the two intertwine and culminate in a space were they can interact in their own terms and dissolve the hierarchy created by the public gardens and the private research spaces. The library as a whole is an armature of interaction inspired by the site and surrounding circulatory systems of the city. The spatial intersections that created this dissolution are inspired by the way the Manhattan bridge (The main road to the site) mixes public walkers, semi-public subway cars, and private drivers.

The Library learns from its surroundings, respects the existing market and elevates the culture it holds with a vertical farm that eventually interfaces directly with the private section of the library to create a cross pollination of programs and users. The library is an armature of interaction and public/private dissolution for mutual benefit of culture and knowledge.

Steel Frame, Tensile/Compression Cooperative Structure. Library, Vertical Farm, Cultural Center.