if on the line a magician
Staging Projective Encounters on The High Line
Cornell University, Fall 2024, Thesis
Independent Project
Advisors: Andrea Simitch and Ryan Whitby
“The poetics of the “open” work tends to encourage ‘acts of conscious freedom’ on the part of the performer and place him at the focal point of a network of limitless interrelations.” -Umberto Eco, The Open Work
This thesis envisions architecture as an open work - resisting deterministic constructs by instigating pre-reflective agency and projective imagination through space. Seeking to destabilize prescribed realities, it restructures cognition through sensory dissonance, formal operations, and narrative transformations.
A series of improvisational encounters unfold on the urban stage of the High Line, NYC. Flowing through the seams of the city’s schismatic structure, the line becomes a porous mediator between fragmented realities. Divinatory frameworks are translated into a psycho-spatial language in which sequences, thresholds, and perceptual destabilization organize movement and choice prior to conscious interpretation. Theatres layer intuitive projections, composing spaces of subconscious multiplicity and performative uncertainty.
Reality and stage blur in spontaneous play, and agency emerges between chance operations and collective lucid dreaming.
Veiled Suspension
“The real is impossible because it is always in its place—it carries on beneath its veils, repressed, rejected, unknown.” (The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book XI, 1973)
The intervention at Chelsea Market constructs a condition of veiling and deferral through visual and gravitational destabilization. Two parallel paths emerge from tunnel visions and split on the High Line, unseen from each other, displacing choice from visual confirmation to intuition.
Suspended drawbridges extend in near-contact, amplifying unresolved forces as shifting grounds blur solid and porous. Walkways wrap around layered veils, where fluttering reflective surfaces register the river wind, entangling with the park’s rhythms. Layered glass surfaces and one-way mirrors manipulate light - reflecting, refracting, and obscuring - to stage moments of tension and revelation, while glimpses flicker between spatial volumes in accidental alignments. A diagonal path cuts through all veiled realities, revealing the river.
Threading between Chelsea Market, The Standard Hotel, the Google office building, and 14th Street Park, the intervention becomes a charged threshold for everyday encounters and fleeting confrontations between parallel realities.
Vertical Metamorphosis
This intervention in the art gallery district establishes a metamorphic spatial condition, amplifying the High Line’s transformation from industrial freight line to layered ecologies of nature and art. Positioned along the Flyover—a segment bridging Chelsea’s residential blocks and art galleries—it reinterprets verticality through scent, sound, and mist to evoke ambiguity and creation.
Immaterial pathways weave through interstitial spaces, linking school and gallery buildings as they hover over lush vegetation. Photography and fabric programs extend from the existing site, framing and reimagining reality. Greenhouses spill onto rooftops, releasing mist and scent into an ethereal cloudscape that ignites with reflected sunset. Reimagined towers, derived from site chimneys, act as vertical apparatuses for scent mixing, sound reverberation, and celestial projection.
The pathways, towers, and greenhouses form a composition of shifting sensory experience, observation, and introspection to evoke transformation.
Chance Projection
“Time forks perpetually toward innumerable futures. In one of them I am your enemy.” -Jorge Luis Borges, Garden of Forking Paths
This intervention at the Hudson train yard stages revelations, layering cycles of sun, trains, and human circulation to bridge hidden infrastructure and public realms. Situated on a site soon to be buried beneath a contested casino, the project reclaims the train yard as a cultural ground of unresolved future possibilities.
The ground plane peels upward, folding into a roofscape that reveals the rhythmic movement of trains—the city’s invisible pulse. The roof, varying in transparency, creates three resolutions of internal spatial experience. Reflective surfaces catch and scatter the sunset, while shallow rain pools vibrate with the passing trains, their sounds resonating through the porous flooring. This sensory layering ritualizes the site’s constant motion. Infrastructurally, the design mirrors the layered floor strategy on Hudson Yard’s public square: rainwater retention pools integrated beneath planters, serving both ecological function and spatial atmosphere.
Within the linearity of train tracks, pivot points introduce moments of redirection and choice, where cyclical systems intersect with contingency.
Process
References
Eco, Umberto. The Open Work. Translated by Anna Cancogni. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989.
Bruno, Giuliana. Atmospheres of Projection: Environmentality in Art and Screen Media. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014.
Borges, Jorge Luis. The Garden of Forking Paths. In Ficciones, translated by Anthony Kerrigan. New York: Grove Press, 1962.
Coop Himmelb(l)au. Spazi Atonali e Ibridazione Linguistica. Milan: Electa, 1989.
Koolhaas, Rem. Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan. New York: The Monacelli Press, 1994.
Foucault, Michel. Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason. Translated by Richard Howard. New York: Vintage Books, 1988.