Delano Village

Delano Village

Delano Village

Delano Village

Delano Village

Delano Village

Delano Village

Delano Village

Delano Village

Delano Village

Delano Village

Delano Village

Delano Village

Delano Village

Delano Village

Delano Village

Delano Village

Delano Village

Delano Village

Delano Village

Delano Village is a 12 acre, 1,800 residential unit superblock in Harlem in the process of a transformation from a tower-in-the-park housing development to a contemporary revitalized urban zone. Our proposal includes two new residential buildings totalling 200,000 square feet located at the southwest corner of the site. A diagonal path between the buildings serves as a gateway to the complex creating a new axis of pedestrian movement into the site. This path, together with others, forms a series of shortcuts through the site which psychologically stitch the superblock back into the neighbourhood fabric, if not formally. The new system of paths serve the residential towers by connecting to their entries which are transformed into wide handicapped accessible inclined surfaces. At the perimeter, redesigned surface parking lots recede into the site to provide space for prismatic pavilions for the storage of tools and implements and to host amenities for the residents and the surrounding community while animating the adjacent streets. Existing playgrounds are redesigned and reshaped. Long grasses are planted on the site in a super-scaled pattern modeled after the digital camouflage pattern CADPAT (Canadian Disruptive Pattern) developed and used by the Canadian military forces as a computer generated pattern incorporating sophisticated near infrared protection designed to conceal soldiers from image intensification devices such as night vision. The overlaying of these systems renders each one unintelligible but creates a seemingly complicated formal apparatus resulting in a visual dynamism for the site.