Completed in 1949, the Farragut Houses were part of New York City’s ambitious postwar housing program. Ten brick towers rose across a superblock, replacing overcrowded tenements with standardized apartments and shared courtyards. While intended to provide light, air, and efficiency, the “tower-in-the-park” model soon revealed its limitations: rigid repetition, barren landscapes, and little support for individuality or layered domestic life. This proposal approaches Farragut through transformation rather than demolition, treating the towers as structures with untapped social, material, and spatial capacity. Floors extend outward into terraces and balconies, creating an interlocking system that reframes the mass while granting each apartment direct access to outdoor space. Equally central is the introduction of internal stairs. Vertical layering, common in wealthier housing typologies, is largely absent from public housing, where single-level units prevail. By incorporating stairs, the project introduces new thresholds between public and private zones while restoring a sense of hierarchy, movement, and aspiration. The red overlay diagram makes this ambition visible: terraces and stair-linked volumes wrap the towers in a new rhythm. The gesture is not ornament but recalibration, preserving the durable structure while offering residents a more generous relationship to space, community, and the city at large.
Photograph Farragut Housing Campus NYCHA
Brooklyn, NY
The site plan reveals the campus at the scale of the superblock: ten cruciform towers dispersed across fields of undefined open space, cut off from the surrounding street grid. Sectional cuts taken every 100 feet mark their vertical rise against the surrounding low-rise fabric. These diagrams expose both the durability and the deficiency of the type. While robust in structure, the towers are repetitive and isolated, offering little gradation between collective ground and private dwelling. Rather than appearing obsolete, the campus reads as under-realized, its form awaiting strategies of activation and repair.
RED HOOK, BROOKLYN
SECTIONS FARRAGUT HOUSING CAMPUS
NORTH TO SOUTH CUT TAKEN EVERY 100FT.
This composite drawing presents the transformation at the scale of the building. Demolition (red) and new construction (black) are overlaid onto the original floor plans, clarifying the relationship between subtraction and addition. By retaining the organizational logic of the original while extending terraces and balconies outward, the proposal situates itself in direct dialogue with the building’s history. Stairs, patios, and interlocking volumes emerge as new layers within the familiar cruciform form, reframing its identity without erasure. The drawing operates simultaneously as technical document and conceptual artifact, condensing strategies of subtraction, extension, and reuse into a single spatial narrative.
At the scale of the unit, the diagrams reveal how the dwelling itself is reimagined. The axonometric shows terraces and stairs reshaping the apartment, creating thresholds between interior and exterior, public and private. The exploded sequence illustrates how these changes stack and repeat, turning isolated interventions into a collective system of living. The section situates the modified units within the tower, showing how incremental adjustments align vertically into a new rhythm across the façade. Together, these studies propose a redefinition of the dwelling: no longer a compressed, single-level container, but a layered framework capable of sustaining more varied and generous forms of domestic life.
To address the unresolved grounds of the superblock, the project turned to Nolli maps as a tool of abstraction. Precedents offered two distinct urban logics: Fez integrates life, work, and community within a dense, human-scaled fabric, while Tokyo evolves through constant recomposition, layering infrastructures and uses to sustain livability under extreme density. Overlaying these spatial orders generated new relationships: circulation networks colliding, densities overlapping, boundaries dissolving. In this way, mapping became speculative rather than descriptive, opening new possibilities for how Farragut might be reconceived.
The mapping study extended into physical form. Acetate overlays of Fez and Tokyo were layered beneath a cardboard model of the Farragut site, with the ten existing towers suspended above their property lines. The shifting layers below produced evolving spatial conditions rather than fixed diagrams. The model reframed the campus as dynamic, with figure and ground in constant negotiation and density understood as contingent and adaptive rather than predetermined. More than representation, it functioned as a speculative lens, suggesting how the latent potential of the site could be unlocked through strategies of overlap, layering, and transformation.
