The Manhattan Office Tower

Rehabilitating The Manhattan Office Tower.

We, being members of nature, have to rethink how we create the places we live in. This project intends to transform the existing office environment in Lower Manhattan by proposing a new kind of urbanity that responds to local site and building conditions through a relationship of shelter and social interactions inspired in nature.

The goal is to diversify the typical generic office tower by carving its structure open and populating the carved voids with a new aggregated structural system that operates as a generator of opportunities between the existing and the new structure, as well as reinforcing the relationships between the tower and the city.

“Why don’t rabbits burrow rectangular burrows? Why didn’t early man make rectangular caves?” (Archigram - Spray Plastic House - David Greene 1962)

“…The box… has been, and remains; the basic element of architecture …The box is perhaps the single most practical invention of human thought. Considering that it appears nowhere in the visible scale of nature, it is also one of the purest and most abstract” (Lebbeus Woods).