ARCH601 | Hina Jamelle [Fall 2019]

Location: New York City, NY

Awards: Published in Pressing Matters 9

The emergence of a new program and form manifested from a historic region of the Lower East Side of Manhattan generates a unique dialogue between a site’s existing aesthetic and the latent potential of a new design. By extracting existing datum and reference lines associated with the Sunshine Theatre and adjacent buildings as well as analyzing the site’s orchestration of deep texture through graffiti, lineaments were designed to create a relationship between the new form and the already-built geometries.

The ground floor of the structure remains as an active viewing stage, but the intervention of a secondary program throughout the public regions of the structure reacts to the advancements of the moving image industry, involving the so-called new “magic” involved in the orchestration between art and technological advances. As the form progresses upward and inward, skeletal seams and depth of layering materials begin to interact and grow symbiotically throughout the volume; units are shifted in scale to their interrelations, but yet read as a single and unique profile, similar to the exterior geometries of the new, creating a unique profile against the Lower East Side sky line.