New Levittown
Levittown, New York, USA 2010-12
Unbuilt, Competition entry for Build a Better 'Burb, 2010
Edge condition, arterial view from Gardiner's Avenue
Edge condition, View from subdivision
View inside New Levittown
Arial View of New Levittown
Characteristic view- oblique
Characteristic view- oblique elevational
Characteristic view- axial, boulevard
Characteristic view- axial, street
New Levittown responds to the program brief by creating a
quasi-urban densification that would serve as an attractor for this particular area of Long Island. The treatment of various
existing site elements and infrastructures, namely the highways which divide the site into quarters
and the plots of unused land, are seen as part of a phasing plan whereby sustainability features such
as mass transit boulevard and conversion of unused plots of land into rainwater gardens and bio-
retention facilities grow into the design. The project is anchored by the superimposition of a 'modernist
imaginary' onto prexisting site elements.
Typical Building Assembly
Interior Vignettes
Here with New Levittown we deliberately expose the operational space of architecture, a space that is usually conflated with the site in order to 'ground' architecture.
By doubling the datum for which architecture is measured and produced, we destabilize the ground. This has the effect of inclining the project
towards an affirmation of modernist tropes, namely disconnecting the ground plane from the building, having the
subject implicated in completing the work through his or her positioning, and a redefining of the alienating effects of modernism as the ability
to let site(s) read through and engender a plurality of inhabitations.