Polypolis

WORKLIVE Studio | Spring 2019 | Professor: Dan Wood (WORKac)

The studio was challenged with considering the future of living and working through skyscraper typology and the site of Long Island City, NYC. The project observes the existing community of Queens and proposes “work” as the work of the neighborhood -- the collections of people that make up an apartment building or block, the small-scale businesses, the street-level interactions of passers by, the networks of care that maintain the community. Normally, these relationships are disrupted through the scale of development mandated by a skyscraper. The project proposes a series of discrete 4-storey mixed-use “neighborhoods” that respond to each other across a distinct “street”, which in turn wraps up the building to create a series of connected public rights of way. In doing so, it explores what it might mean to actually attempt modernism’s grand “streets in the sky”, and what that could look like for Queens.