Alexander Gryger, AIA

Shared Stories proposes an architectural metaphor for New York City through the mapping of three programs, A House, A Subway, and A Nightclub onto a single site in Hunter's Point, Queens.

The story lines of these three spatial characters and the site’s remaining fragments of the former Long Island City Savings Bank Building overlap, intertwine, and blur while its inhabitants interact as neighbors sharing common sensory experiences of the building through the critically detailed Party Wall, which frames the architectural moments where sights, sounds, textures, lights and shadows pass between adjacent spaces.

The Storyboards depict a visual narrative of architectural atmospheres – the combined sensory effect of its materials, textures, details, lights and shadows – in mixed media perspective drawings. Each scene is imbued with a unique quality of ambient light given by the time and weather conditions during a period of day turning to night.

Shared Stories’ critical architectural moment is the Party Wall which occurs where the inhabitants of each of the project’s three programs interact as neighbors by sharing common sensory experiences, sights, sounds, textures, lights and shadows, that are permitted to pass between adjacent spaces through the detailing of the wall sections.

The Collaged City Drawings, which overlay plan and section, are the first conceptual designs for Shared Stories. A collection of urban elements such as stairs, subway entrances, walls, balconies, archways, walkways, and streets placed within the collaged composition of the drawings generate the project’s basic forms and spatial prototypes.

Born out of diagrams that analyze and network topographical traits by mapping the flow of water down the sloping, rocky site, this proposal for a “Froebel Kindergarten” responds to the landscape, rather than imposing upon it, maintaining the interconnection between children and nature that is key to its program. Through the use of a tectonic of imbricated plates allowed to “flow” across the site, forming streams and pooling against the rock outcroppings, the building behaves like the land while maintaining a unique stepped and terraced interior landscape.

Working under the premise that Rome can be continually updated through new combinations of the city's spatial prototypes, the design for an interpretive museum and urban space at Rome's Largo di Torre Argentina reconfigures an urban stair sequence that ascends the Gianicolo Hill into a new architectural narrative that leads visitors on a descent from the street level of modern Rome to the historical layers below.

Ink Line and Wash is a collection of vignettes of places, atmospheres, and architectural forms represented with technical pens, ink and watercolor wash techniques.

Inspired by the proposed Library Site's proximity to New York’s historic Marble Cemetery, a cultural artifact embedded in the modern city, where carved plaques mounted in its stone courtyard walls record the names of those interred in the field of marble vaults below, the Library, an archive for the history of New York City, serves a parallel function of containing and preserving written records of the past.

Reminiscent of the brick alleyway entrance to Marble Cemetery, one approaches the Library walking north-south along two rough-cast walls that shade and shelter the site from traffic on Lafayette Avenue. Reaching the site's mid-point, one steps down from the street into the building's central courtyard and exterior public space. To the north, a building mass of reading rooms and classrooms rises from the earth. Two and a half stories overhead, the floor of the auditorium crosses the space, sheltering and shading the volume of the courtyard. To the south, the Library's main wing, the Archive, settles into the earth where its crystalline double-curtain wall container filters light from above and wraps its preserved contents in a silent repose.

The practice of Mapping searches for potential in existing grounds, reworking what is already known, and uncovering phenomenon previously unseen.