Governors Island’s early twentieth-century houses occupy a state of suspension between preservation and erasure. They are too intact to register as ruins, yet too obsolete to serve as functioning institutions. Built for officers during the island’s U.S. Army and later Coast Guard tenure, they were once embedded within a dense framework of parade grounds, barracks, and administrative buildings. With the military’s departure in the 1990s, this network dissolved, leaving shells whose brick facades, porches, and symmetrical plans remain legible but detached from function. This ambiguity formed the project’s point of departure.
Photographic Negative 5 Nolan Park, Governors Island
5 Nolan Park was reframed as an optical device rather than a fixed object. Through the camera obscura, outward views were captured from within, registering what the structure itself perceived. These images, printed on transparent film, were layered onto an acrylic reconstruction of the house. A mirrored plane inverted the projections, collapsing interior and exterior while folding facades back upon themselves. The model functioned not as representation but as lens, re-projecting its surroundingsand dissolving solidity. Within this framework, adaptive reuse was understood not as repair but as estrangement, enabling the site to be seen anew.
Light was approached as a generative force. Using Snell’s Law (n≈1.5 for glass), solar incidence across the day was mapped as rays entered, refracted, and exited the volume. Cuts, folds, and planes arose not from conventional spatial logic but from the bending of light itself. The drawing was both analytical and speculative: time and atmosphere applied pressure to form, while glass acted as an active medium that delayed, distorted, and refracted perception into space.
Projection became both technique and driver. Through descriptive geometry, the house was subjected to a classical system of vanishing points and projection lines. Volumes collapsed across planes, mirrored geometries recalled optical inversion, and elevations registered as surfaces of projection rather than fixed documents. Distortion and instability emerged as evidence of process.
The speculative building organized itself as a tripartite gallery of lower, middle, and upper levels, connected through circulation. Glass folds followed refracted paths, apertures tracked the sun, and boundaries shifted under projection. Enclosure was conceived less as wall than as surface of light. The gallery operated simultaneously as architecture and as instrument, an inhabitable lens that recorded and redistributed its surroundings.
The final building was resolved through a four-foot bisected physical model, conceived as both architectural proposal and optical device. Inverted images of Governors Island were projected onto its matte white surfaces so that pitched roofs acted as screens, floors absorbed shadow, and edges dissolved into atmosphere. The model operated as more than representation: it staged the building as performance, where context became content and site became projection. In this form, adaptive reuse was articulated not as restoration but as re-seeing, an architecture that enacted vision as spatial construct.
