013 Peace Pentagon

013 Peace Pentagon: A Call to action

Year: Completed 2008

Type: Competion Coordination and Exhibition
Location: New York, NY
Collaborators: Maureen Shea, Friends of 339.

The Architectural Competition

A nondescript building at the intersection of Lafayette Place and Bleeker Street in New York houses several peace and social justice organizations in New York City. The building is in need of an extensive structural remediation such that the current tenants are considering a new building. Our role as the architect for the feasibility study expanded to engage the debate within the building community and to strategize to save the building from being sold.

We coordinated an architectural competition, to envision new possibilities for a building that optimizes the use of resources, raises public awareness about the activities within the building and provokes thinking about an architecture that expresses activism for peace and justice. We received a grant from the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council and received over 128 entries from artists and architects all over the world. The interdisciplinary jury selected a group of projects that spoke of the diversity of responses to the question, “How can a Building mobilize for peace?”The exhibition (March 15 – April 30, 2010)
featured over fifty entries at different locations in lower Manhattan in close proximity to the site. The attempt to disperse the exhibit at various locations arose out of the desire to strengthen the connection between the buildings users and their neighborhood.

The web site for this competition maps the history of public actions by the War Resisters League, one of the building’s principal tenants. On October 21, 2009, Friends of 339 held a march from 339 Lafayette via Bleecker Street and Bowery to Storefront for Art and Architecture in order to publicize the competition and manifest the building communities’ desire to reach out to local institutions. The proposed exhibition extended the process of mapping and connecting. The main building at 339 Lafayette Street acted as a message board to list the venues for the exhibit.

The Peace Pentagon Competition Exhibition was on view at 4 locations. Each location covered a different “theme” explored by the competitors.The exhibitors installed large scale models within the NYPL branch library on Mulberry street. The competition boards were displayed in the storefront of Mc Nally Jackson Books, ABC No Rio and in the lobby of Common Room on Grand street. This process of finding venues helped us engage with the larger not for profit community in the lower east side and made the architectural competition visible to a larger audience. The outreach tactics of the activists were thus deployed in a different way to engage a larger audience.

For further information on competition please look at www.peacepentagoncompetition.net