Body/City – New York, Architectural Competition

This project reimagines Manhattan’s infrastructural spine as a living urban body, where circulation, ecology, and collective presence intersect. It reinterprets Robert Moses’ hard infrastructures through soft eco-corridors and pedestrian passageways, transforming them into relational and porous spaces.

The strategy expands the city spatially by connecting water, ground, and vertical structures, revealing unexpected urban layers from the river to the rooftops. Infrastructures become thresholds that host collective encounters, gardens, terraces, and public paths. It brings attention to the interstitial and overlooked spaces—under bridges, along the waterfront, on roofs—that hold potential for shared inhabitation.

Temporally, the project works to reconnect Manhattan with its islands, activating forgotten trajectories and reclaiming infrastructures as public commons. It embraces wandering, slowness, and dérive as tools to map the psychogeography of the city and imagine new forms of environmental and social coexistence.

These ideas resonate with performative and corporeal practices that have historically explored the city as a stage and infrastructure as a site of embodied action—such as Trisha Brown’s “Roof Piece” (1971), Gordon Matta-Clark’s urban cuts, and early Skywalk performances. In this lineage, Body/City treats the city not as a static object, but as a terrain to be climbed, crossed, and inhabited through sensory and physical engagement.