In collaboration with Nabila Sarkar
The spirit of the maker movement is one of entrepreneurship, participation, and sharing. The proliferation of this model has the potential to enable a more communal type of lifestyle, one that encourages productive and meaningful social interactions among all people, even those without a making background.
To facilitate this within a mixed use program, the idea of a threshold emerged as a primary means of understanding how the public could interact and engage with the residents. Both public program and residential units are scattered throughout the building, with the residential units interfacing closely with the participants in the public program. Each unit is a loft space equipped with both living space and a garage space. This garage space meshes the privacy of a unit with the public. This space can become a storefront or a personal working space and gallery for the maker. Another option may be to rent this space out to a different person entirely.
The residential unit modules are aggregated into bars, designated links, arranged to create dynamic residual spaces in which the public program resides. These links do not fill the entirety of this site and therefore, the kinks and overlaps leave room for variety of public programs, intended to encourage the public to use the building, regardless of being a tenant within the building. These gap spaces work in conjunction with the links to create a spatial experience that highlights both the residential and public programs to ultimately foster an inclusive community for people of all backgrounds.