CHRYSLER BUILDING REUSE — MIAO XUE PORTFOLIO

WIP - Chrysler Building Reuse
- Interior/vertical urbanism with Portals-Tunnels-Chambers

The 1916 New York City Zoning Resolution sculpted the skyline: setbacks preserved access to light and air, while skyscrapers rose as vertical machines pumping water and air to heights of a thousand feet. Elevators granted humans the ability to travel vertically, compressing the city into layers. The repetition of footprints allowed for infinite variations of life to unfold within these towers.

Skyscrapers in the NYC are threaded together by a highly developed network of subways at urban scale. At a more local scale, 42nd Street Grand Central Station, bound Chrysler building as one of those skyscrapers tighter through their interconnected underground circulation.

Chrysler building’s 1,260,000 square feet hold the potential to sustain an entire society of vertical urbanism. Yet with half its floors vacant, the challenge is no longer expansion but reoccupation: while transforming the floor of floors of normality as a conceptual solid and communal space as carved voids, it set up a sectional figure-ground relationship that resonates and reconstructs the memory of communities. Beyond the dichotomy of solid and void, poche and volume, the design imagines ornament reimagined—historic precedents distilled and recomposed under contemporary construction—to create interiors strong enough to stand as landmarks themselves.

URBAN READINGS - 42ND GNRAD CENTRAL AS AN UNDERGROUND NETWORK OF LANDMARKS