Compo Pavilion

Public Competition | New York, NY | Finalist

Compo, a design for a pavilion on Roosevelt Island, was selected as a Finalist for AIA New York’s 2019 City of Dream’s Competition. The project is a series of walls of various heights that are arranged and layered to create playful interstitial paths and framed views of the city. Despite this seeming whimsy, however, the walls’ height and orientation are carefully drawn from the context beyond the island. The site lines of the walls are aligned both with the city block of Manhattan and with housing projects in Astoria, Queens. The cut-through allows the visitors to orient themselves to both conditions.

In addition to locating visitors within these specific urban geographies, Compo encourages people to think about their position in various material economies as well. We collaborated with Byfusion, a company that is currently developing the ByBlock®, a sustainable building unit made entirely of recycled plastic. Our design celebrates rather than hides the material of these blocks, forcing consideration of the plastics that we use and discard on a daily basis. Through this project, we hoped to inspire users to think about how their material choices can make possible closed-loop life cycles.

Project Team: Daisy Ames, Julie Perrone, Sarah Rutland