SHROOMS
Loft Houses, East New York
Credits: Michael Sorkin, Andrei Vovk, Peter Kormer, M. Mueller,
A. Schachter
The genesis of Shrooms is in the idea of an “all-sided” loft
building in a particular New York neighborhood - East New
York - characterized by extensive abandonment and vacant
land, much of it city-owned. Looking at the empty lots not as
blight but as a community resource, we hoped that a growing
garland of Shrooms might have a ripple effect in greening
the neighborhood. In addition, we thought of the loft-type as
a crucial proto-public space. Not a space with a fi xed or predetermined
set of uses but a kind of resource out of which
innumerable private possibilities might be drawn. As an
urban proposition, Shrooms seeks to establish a new pattern
of movement through the neighborhood, a greenway which
operates not as a replacement for the street grid but as a
supplement to it. Flowing through the middle of the large
blocks, it occupies the spaces of abandonment as they are
found. These public greenways lead to the “green-rooms” at
the core of each structure. |
