Tower / Acropolis

The project begins with the tectonic problem:
Manhattan is a city of non-towers; all tall and slender but none are readable from the ground to the top, none vary the section, and they're all crowded into autonomous city blocks.
The desire: to liberate the tower from the urban fabric and allow for a full tectonic reading of it.
To make a tower happen.
City Hall Park: A network of historic towers, pushing and pulling at each other across the park. Held back by outriggers to the cores, three replacements for the facades are placed as abstract extensions of each tower. They exist simultaneously as references of the towers within and as viewfinders out into the city. They imply an invisible public plane, elevated above the park, that joins them.
Possible program: movie theater.

Professors Diane Lewis, Peter Schubert, Mersiha Veledar, Roger Duffy, Daniel Shearer
Cooper Union; 2008