Temporary Urban Inhabitation

The project involved selecting a site in Manhattan with a "threshold" quality, or one with a "latency for inhabitation". This threshold would serve as a departure point for investigations into the conditions surrounding the design of a temporary inhabitation for a transient urban figure.
The site at 60th Street between 1st and 2nd Avenues is a powerful gateway connecting people and cars. As the offramp from the Queensboro Bridge cuts through the street it juxtaposes the human domestic scale and the vehicular urban scale. This tenstion was one I wanted to amplify. A hotel for buses and people emerged as the program.
The design process revolved around developing drawings and models simultaneously in a constant back-and-forth dialogue.

Professors Guido Zuliani, Pablo Lorenzo-Eiora, Caroline O'Donnell
Cooper Union, 2007