First Project of the New School Year

The new school year has begun at Pratt and we're full throttle ahead! Our first project in studio was a quick 3 week project to get everyone warmed up. We were charged with designing a "Space for Reflection" at the Whitney Museum using their downstairs lobby and courtyard.

When I thought about a space for reflection, the first image that popped into my head was the Cathedral of St John the Divine in Morningside Heights where I used to go and sit while I was in college.

On the other hand, when I asked my Mom to describe where she would go to reflect, her immediate answer was to an arboretum, or out into nature. So I knew right then that my challenge was going to be to meld the notions of a sacred space with the idea of a natural space.

And when I considered what linked our two, seemingly very different, spaces, what I realized it boiled down to is that they are both spaces that help put our lives in perspective. When our daily anxieties and stresses seem to grow to monstrous proportions, we seek out a space of reflection to help us realize that in comparison to the scale of the universe, our problems are smaller and lighter than we'd thought. Like the moment of awe that this little boy feels when contemplating the vastness of a whale, and the ocean, and the world:

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From the very beginning, I knew that I wanted to use a single simple gesture to express this idea: inserting a plane of glass at street level into the "moat" of the Whitney, upon which a small shallow sheet of water will be allowed to collect:

From street level, it would transform the Whitney into a reflecting pool, a gesture that played on the title of the project, as well as referencing many historical spaces of refection including the Oklahoma City Bombing Memorial:

Once inside the Whitney, when visitors go downstairs and out into the courtyard they will be bathed in rippling moving light, and gaze up through the water at New York City above them:

Here are my renderings, walking through the space like a visitor.

Encountering the Whitney Museum Moat from the North

Walking downstairs from the lobby

Looking from inside towards the courtyard downstairs

Sitting in the courtyard under the pane of glass

Looking at featured artwork "1st Light" Installation by Paul Chan

Sitting inside on benches

By the time the visitor walks back upstairs and out onto the street, I hope that they've seen New York through a different lens, one that helps them put it all in perspective.