New Cultural Center in New York
In front of the MET, on 5th Avenue in New York, the site of a new cultural center has been chosen. The urban fabric of the city leaves a gap of only 8 meters between two tall buildings. The intervention aims to mend this forgotten gap in the middle of a street that has much to offer. The building wants to be a public facility for the Goethe institute that welcomes the community to develop cultural activities such as dance, writing, visual art, music, and theater. In addition to the exhibition and creative workspaces, the program includes temporary housing for those who will work in the institute, giving them the opportunity to take full advantage of the site's favorable location. The building contains a library, a theater, offices, dining and relaxation spaces, studios, meeting rooms, and cluster housing. The principle behind the project comes from the concept of "gap", the void, the breach in an established urban fabric. The limits of the project are imposed by the very boundaries of this void. The building respects the height imposed by the context, not rising above the apex of the adjacent buildings. It fills the space between them both in width and in depth; it exploits their limits, the blind walls at the edges of the building, to anchor the structure of beams that, in a game of weaving, run from one end to the other. In this weave that orders the void, the beam is sometimes released from its structural function. It becomes an architectural element according to the needs, once a step, or a handrail, a table, or a chair. The circulation is solved thanks to a cold barycentric staircase that, together with light wells, illuminates the space. The ground floor is public and favors the passage through the block.
