Gowanus Museum

The final project for my senior year undergrad architecture studio was to design a museum in the Gowanus neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York. The museum would primarily be dedicated to displaying artifacts from significant American social movements, and also serve as a community gathering and event space. I got to visit the site and document the surrounding area, which significantly affected my design process. The area was hit hard by Hurricane Sandy in 2012, during which the canal alongside the site flooded and damaged many of the surrounding buildings. With this in mind, I tailored my design to protect the museum from future severe weather events, which would inevitably become more common due to climate change.

Inspired by the wooden pilings in the canal, I based the design of my museum around pyramidal structures that elevated the first floor of the building up over 10 feet. I made many dozens of small models to figure out the structure of these pyramids. The ground level would serve as a public plaza and event space. Ascending up the pyramids transitions from more open and public to more closed and private, with the larger 1st level being an open plan accommodating some displays and meeting spaces, and the 2nd level would be a set of closed rooms for quiet reflection on the displayed objects. I had fun incorporating tarot card imagery into the design, which informed some of the ‘narratives’ of the spaces I designed, and provided a unique visual feel for the imagery.