STANTON BUILDING REIMAGINED

My Spring 2024 semester’s project was a community center with a theater, an amphitheater and a reading room in Sara D. Roosevelt Park. Rather than starting from a blank site, I decided to incorporate the existing neglected Stanton Building into my project, by developing a mass timber frame over it. The existing Stanton building becomes the entrance into the community center, allowing visitors to appreciate a nod to historic New York before stepping into the contemporary addition. The theater space is hung by cables from the CLT frame, and is connected to the Stanton building via bold ADA-accessible ramps. Right below the ramps is the forum space, allowing bypassers to look down and observe the events without disrupting the participants. The amphitheater is below the hung theater, allowing visitors to observe its structural system and receive direct sunlight from the edges of the site, serving also as the connector between the two sides of the park.