Between Mist & Reality

This proposal engages climatic elements as a primary agent of architecture, transforming the Storefront for Art and Architecture into a space to observe and experience the relationships between the city and the elements of a swamp. By building out three hyper-humid rooms of varying sizes, this proposal searches for and aims to encapsulate the transitional nature of the swamplands. By utilizing tinted PVC curtains to cover the primary apertures of the space and allowing artificially induced fog to trickle out, the public is invited to physically encapsulate themselves within the swamplands.

Like the swamplands, which are neither totally land nor totally water, these rooms create soft boundaries between the natural and artificial. Blurring the relationship between inside and outside, these rooms provide a platform in which different social encounters may unfold. An interpretation of the ephemeral, this intervention aims to make sense of the foggy, humid, wet, and biodiverse nature of swamplands often hidden from our human experience.

Swamplands act as buffers between human expansion and untamed wilderness, transitional zones rich with contradictions and mystique. Our proposal for Swamplands ties to these ‘misunderstood landscapes’ of Swamplands - creating three unique spaces that act as points for cultural engagement. We did this by simulating climatic factors such as humidity and fog, as equal agents, to evoke natural phenomena through artificially generated means.

Rich in experiential metaphors to what it is like to travel through the coastal areas of the Eastern seaboard, this proposal turns the building inside out, positioning the swamplands as a sensory experience from which to observe the dualities and ambiguities of New York City’s urban fabric. Like an imperfect translation, the ephemeral is evasive, yet it provides an opportunity to soften boundaries and question our relationship to the natural and built world.