The left-over back-of-house void within the city block has become an exposed inhabitable mass in the park.

The project begins with the exploration of two topical conditions: City of Ground and City of Sky.  Following sociologist Georg Simmel’s observation that each expansion along the periphery of the city results in a greater concentration at the center, I investigated Wall Street as a moment of extreme vertical and horizontal expansion.     I also took the plans of twenty American cities and compared their footprints to the height of their tallest buildings.

A rectangular site was then chose straddling Fifth Avenue.  The chosen program was a Museum for Central Park, with half of the site in the park and the other half buried within the fabric of the city.  Certain private functions are housed in a series of small pavilions which pierce the space of the interior of the city block, while the public functions of the museum are grounded in the small triangle of Central Park between 96th and 97th Streets.