REPURPOSED FACADE MOCKUPS

TESTBEDS
New York, New York
2019–

New Affiliates, with Samuel Stewart-Halevy and the New York City Parks Green Thumb Program

Piggybacking Tactic
Capture a Waste Stream

Conventional building developments produce waste from short-duration constructions in the form of construction mock-ups. Full-scale façade mock-ups up to one story tall have increasingly become de rigueur among New York City’s newest high-rise projects. Typically discarded upon a building’s completion, they allow design and construction teams to research, test, and control for technical performance and design quality ahead of construction. TESTBEDS, a project by Jaffer Kolb and Ivi Diamantopoulou of New Affiliates, in collaboration with Samuel Stewart-Halevy and the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation, seeks to capture and redirect this waste stream for public reuse. Their proposal—which they describe as being akin to a “rescue operation”—is to reconfigure these discarded assemblages as the basis for any number of local community garden structures—sheds, shade structures, casitas, greenhouses, or raised beds. Much more than a simple reuse of raw materials, the project’s aim is to bring the “image of the growing city down to the ground,” to recontextualize the mock-ups while simultaneously “humanizing the scale of the skyline.”