Waste to Energy
Fall, 2024
Site Location: East 74th Street New York City
Team: Changwan Lim
Instructor: Fei Wang
Asian Design Award (ADA) 23th Edition
Excellence Award
At the edge of Manhattan’s East River, on 74th Street, stands the weathered shell of a 1900s power station—once a monumental engine of New York City’s growth. Built of brick, stone, and steel, the structure received coal by boat, raised its chimney year after year to keep pace with the rising skyline, and carried the physical memory of industrial production in every soot-marked joint. Today, only fragments of that history remain: a 60m by 180m footprint, an 80-foot-tall envelope, and a façade punctured by openings once used to unload coal from the river.
Our studio was tasked with transforming this long-abandoned structure into a Waste-to-Energy (WtE) plant. But the project was never conceived as a clean slate. Instead, it became an exercise in working with the relic, not against it, and asking how a piece of New York’s infrastructural past might meaningfully support a new system of urban production
The project sinks the façade slightly below current street level, compressing the approach and making the preserved wall feel larger, heavier, and more monumental. The gesture pulls visitors closer to the artifact and clarifies that the new architecture grows from the old, not over it.