cross-stitch

Princeton School of Architecture / Graduate Architecture Studio 502 / Spring 2022 / Mentor: Mónica Ponce de León

The city is pliable through the eyes of a four year-old. The domestic and the urban are interwoven, and scale is shrugged off as an opportunity for play. Is a cardboard box a container, or a home? Is it a mailbox, or a castle? The project positions the school and community center as a series of nested, mis-scaled domestic spaces within patches of urban quilt which have been tugged apart. Responding to the desire expressed by local Trenton high school students for more local and sustainable food access, the project lays the soil bare for a new system of public and private urban farms. These not only feed the student body, but stitch the center into the surrounding community. The materiality of the structure further explores this idea of cross-city connectivity, un- and re-stitching using reclaimed brick and steel from surrounding industrial demolition sites. These materials forge a tactile relationship that bridges present students to the multi-layered histories of Trenton.