The 53rd & Lexington station sits in the heart of Midtown, one of the city’s busiest transfer points, yet it belongs to a subway system increasingly strained by extreme rainfall, its drainage routinely exceeded and its infrastructure made precarious. This project proposes a reversal: inundation not as collapse but as generative condition.
The station is reimagined as a subterranean garden, carved from bedrock and lined with limestone panels. Terraced platforms, bridges, and stairways thread through the excavation as stormwater is choreographed into visible cascades, falling onto platforms, slipping beneath grates, flowing underfoot, and descending from level to level before gathering in a cistern below.
In heavy rains, water shifts from background threat to active protagonist, circulating in tandem with human passage. Over time, the limestone surfaces act as geological primers, fostering mineral accretion into stalactites and stalagmites that render the station a living artifact, recalling the ethos of the Land Art movement. The result is a hybrid terrain, engineered yet organic, monumental yet ephemeral, an infrastructural void recast as spatial and temporal artifact.
Station Overlay
The collage renders the station’s atmosphere: an interior suffused with water and light. Veils of rain descend through the void, softening the geometry of columns and stairs, while mirrored pools fracture space into shifting reflections. Figures blur into mist, neither fixed occupants nor passing commuters, but presences folded into environment. Above and below collapse into a continuous field, where skyline, structure, and rainfall converge. What emerges is less depiction than speculation, an interior made cinematic, porous, and alive, where perception itself becomes architectural material.
Google Earth: 53rd Street and 3rd Avenue
Speculative urban section collage
To translate water’s spatial behaviors of flow, collapse, and resistance into recordable form, the project turned to fabric as analogue. Like water, fabric yields, drapes, and folds; unlike water, it retains a trace. Through monoprinting, these movements were pressed into graphic impressions, where creases became abstract topographies of depth, density, and latent order. Each print negotiates the tension between fragility and permanence, softness and structure. In freezing fabric’s behavior into surface, the work generates a visual archive of turbulence, pause, and collapse, a palimpsest of textures that bridges the temporality of soft material with the endurance of architectural surface.
Monoprints
Muslin was pressed into inked plates and pulled away, carrying excess pigment and retaining the impressions of its folds and compressions. What began as an expendable tool became a site of accumulation, each contact embedding a memory of time, pressure, and gesture. Through repetition, the fabric shifted from instrument to artifact, surface as archive where labor, movement, and chance converge into form.
Muslin fabric
From the inked fabric, incidental marks such as folds and compressions were digitally extracted and reinterpreted as tectonic fragments. Each carries the residue of pressure and release, registering as irregular geometries that resist conventional order. When assembled, they suggest modules of a larger syntax, elements capable of rotation, nesting, and expansion.
The exploded axonometric situates these fragments within a layered system, tracing their migration from imprint to structural proposition. What first appears as incidental mark becomes generative component, embedding material memory within architectural formation.
Isolated fragments from muslin prints
Process diagram
When scripted through Rhino Grasshopper, the fragments accumulate into formations of increasing density and intricacy. The diagram charts this escalation, where repetition breeds variation and clusters unfold into terrains. What began as isolated imprints expands into a fractal composed of more than a thousand interlocking parts.
Complexity arises less through composition than through feedback, mutation, and iterative aggregation. The result is not a singular form but a system in continuous evolution, oscillating between order and turbulence, between algorithmic precision and material contingency. Architecture here is conceived as growth, recursive, adaptive, and perpetually in flux.
The drawing renders this generative system as dense terrain, layered, stratified, and resistant to singular reading. Growth and collapse register simultaneously, producing a field that oscillates between structure and erosion. Translated into linework by a robotic arm, the image becomes both artifact and process, a negotiation between the precision of code and the contingencies of matter. Less representation than proposition, it envisions form not as static composition but as something cultivated, recursive, and alive.
Fractal, machine-drafted algorithm
Sited fractal, scale 1:415
Placed within the 53rd & Lexington station, the fractal aligns with circulation paths and structural grid, registering as a dense, eroded mass oscillating between geological strata and fluid turbulence. Rendered in white linework against a black field, it hovers between plan and x-ray, at once embedded in and carved from the city’s underlayer. Channels, voids, and interwoven surfaces stage a tension between infrastructural order and organic intricacy.
At closer scale, the geometry dissolves into fissures and currents, where lines fold, unravel, and overlap in translucent layers. These fragments reveal intersections between fluid logics and rational grid, producing hybrids of organic flow and engineered precision. Here, the drawings read less as objects than as atmospheres, intimate terrains where structure and movement entwine, and where architecture edges toward landscape.
Magnified crops of sited fractal
Long Section, Scale 1:420
Short Section 1:350
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In section, the 53rd & Lexington station is revealed as a carved void, where existing platforms and tunnels remain lodged in bedrock yet are pierced and suspended within a new mass. Terraced platforms, bridges, and stairways thread through the excavation, while water is staged as protagonist, falling onto platforms, slipping beneath grates, flowing underfoot, and cascading downward until gathered in the cistern below.
The cut plans trace this descent: U2 as primary threshold, U4 as transitional span, and U5 dissolving into the subway grid. In the lowest plan, the cut intersects the subway itself, slicing through seats and poles and grounding the geometry in the everyday rituals of transit. The linework, carrying forward the robotic studies of the fractal drawings, folds computational language into the architecture itself. What results is not simply a reconfigured station but a layered terrain, both infrastructural and geological, where the flows of water, matter, and movement are made visible as architecture.
Plan Level U2
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Plan Level U4
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Plan Level U5