New York design studio New Associates and architect and historian Samuel Steward-Halevy have created a prototype of their Testbeds venture, which repurposes architectural fashions used for giant tasks.
Initially introduced in 2020, the staff has accomplished a backyard shed, greenhouse and group house within the New York Metropolis borough of Queens that was made partly from a mannequin created for a luxurious condominium in Tribeca.
Architectural fashions are utilized in many giant development tasks for design evaluation. They’re typically made to the identical customary because the buildings they’re modelling and are normally disposed of after the constructing is full.
New Associates and Steward Halevy noticed a chance to try to use these fashions to switch public buildings in Queens, which they observed have been typically in disrepair.
“By relocating mockups to local people gardens, we imagined a brand new type of Manhattan switch,” stated the staff.
“Right here the mockup turns into a automobile, carrying the excess worth of New York’s high-rise structure into neighborhoods which were traditionally disinvested whereas bringing the picture of the rising metropolis right down to the bottom,” it added, noting that this was solely one among many doable makes use of for the mockups.
Positioned in Backyard by the Bay in Edgemere and accomplished late final 12 months, the shed repurposed the darkish facade of the Tribeca constructing and used it as a structural wall for the first envelope.
The mockup was initially put in in a showroom for the apartment and consists of 4 customized concrete panels and a big glass window.
The staff labored with the New York Metropolis Division of Parks and Recreation’s GreenThumb, an arm of the company that promotes civic programming, to put the mockup within the centre of the city backyard.
“The venture includes many leaps of religion,” the staff instructed Dezeen. “After we first approached the Parks Division, the builders, the engineers and the group members, we at all times anticipated encountering extra skepticism.”
“We have been delighted on the enthusiasm and generosity with which everybody, together with Cape Advisors, responded,” referring to the developer for 30 Warren, the Tribeca apartment for which the mockup was made.
A gabled timber body was suspended over the mockup, connecting it to an adjoining greenhouse that has a cinderblock basis and polycarbonate partitions.
Between the mockup and greenhouse is an open house that’s lined by a big steel sheet that was positioned over the picket body to function a roof.
The staff hopes to increase on the venture by creating quite a lot of comparable buildings in New York Metropolis’s outer boroughs.
New Associates is led by Ivi Diamantopoulou and Jaffer Kolb and obtained AIA New York’s New Practices award in 2020.
Samuel Steward-Halevy is a doctoral candidate at Columbia College.
Different tasks that repurpose buildings embody RSDA’s repurposing of transport containers for buildings on a farm in India.
The images is by Michael Vahrenwald.
