Alexander Young & Tracy Orend

Studio led by Professor Viren Brahmbhatt

Project is featured on NYCxDESIGN Architecture Graduates Showcase, to view click here.

Disrupting Displacement

Williamsburg Eco-Operative Lab-Workshop

Williamsburg, once the manufacturing capital of NYC and in recent decades stage for the accelerating gentrification of Brooklyn, stands to lose the last remnants of its historical community of craftspeople to rampant development and rising land values.

The Workshop is designed to reverse the final and most devastating step of this process: Displacement. Providing a versatile digital maker-space and industrial infrastructure will allow local people to train through experience and earn a position in the emerging economy of sustainable designers and advanced fabricators without losing the spirit of, or their place in, their neighborhood.

Parallel to the Workshop is a lab outfitted for the production and experimental application of fungal myceliumas an architectural material. Initially, the Lab-Workshop will focus on pre-designed modular housing unitswhich will integrate mycelium and aggregate in the provided architectural framework on-site to provide temporary occupancy as needed. When made possible, the rolling crane will allow for the dissemination of units (and other creations) throughout the City via elevated subway track.

A shared facility dedicated to cooperative self-improvement will inevitably extend to bring together the disparate and diverse world of Brooklynites surrounding the contested site, much like the binding tendrils of mushroom mycelium.