Thought About Leaving, Not Moving: Designing Conditions for Artistic Practice and Migration in the Spatial Production of Legitimacy
New York’s rail yards and infrastructural gaps create some of the city’s largest continuous voids. They are sites that disconnect surrounding immigrant and working-class neighborhoods from public space, cultural resources, and economic opportunity. This project proposes to transform one such site into a network of cultural, educational, and hospitality spaces transforming deferred infrastructure into public restitution.
Conceived as a pseudo-campus, the project merges live–work housing, studios, workshops, and rehearsal and performance spaces. Rather than functioning as a singular institution, the campus operates as a layered urban ecosystem that supports daily life, artistic production, and social gathering simultaneously. Where Hudson Yards converted air rights into speculative capital, Jamaica Yard will convert vacancy into civic equity: an infrastructural reparation that gives space back to those historically overlooked by metropolitan planning.
Partnerships with nearby institutions, such as colleges and universities, museums, research centers, and athletic facilities, invite visiting educators, professionals, scientists, and athletes into the site, expanding mentorship, vocational training, and ESL offerings for residents.
The project operates through two strata of beneficiaries. Direct users, being the artists, immigrants, and small businesses that live and work on site, and indirect neighbors who gain green spaces, safer streets, transit improvements, and cultural amenities as a result. By reframing infrastructural land as active civic terrain, the project transforms vacancy into opportunity and builds a foundation for shared belonging and collective prosperity for immigrant artist communities.
Y5 Thesis / FA2025 + SP2026
Partner: Laura Moldovan
Professors Carlyle Fraser, Philip Lee, + Elæ Moss Benedetto
This project serves as the first half of my thesis project, with the studio topic shaped around vacancy and its manifestations within physical, geographical, economic, and sociopolitical sectors. The Fall 2025 Semester was a research seminar, where the individual project direction was formed. The semester wrapped with site research, for which an algorithm was written to input desired data reflective of a specific user group, which then narrowed potential sites by neighborhood. Accompanying this semester’s research is a research essay addressing my individual focus within the overarching topic of vacancy.
This thesis project is ongoing, and updates will continue to post as progress is made.