stacks in celebration

community bathhouse with a waste to energy recycling centre

Spring 2022- Pratt GAUD | Integrated Building Studio | studio faculty: prof. Landon Brown, course co-ordinator: Prof. Alexandra Barker | studio partner: Dana Saari

Located adjacent to the university heights bridge in Bronx, NY, ‘Stacks in Celebration’ is a typological experiment of a community bathhouse and a Waste to Energy Recycling Centre. Inspired by the sensuous industrial embrace of Charles Sheeler’s paintings, the facility creates layers of transparency and translucency to balance a dialogue across the Harlem River, an urban infrastructure, rail tracks and the bridge, pools and baths and the surrounding community.

This layering is achieved by stacking the facilities across a horizontal core parallel to the train tracks and by breaking down the public program into modular units akin to the mat building. This kit of parts attitude to breaking down to the water pools is a direct response to the condition of public pools in New York City—having built only five since 1972. Stacks in Celebration proposes a new kind of New York civic space—one with sensitivity and sensibility and a programmatic response to the city’s infrastructural and cultural needs.