“Like an army of soldiers or like a meadow”

Retrofit · New York, NY · 2021

Yale School of Architecture, Fall 2021 · Critic: Martin Finio, Nico Kienzl, Tess McNamara · Selected for Retrospecta 45

Jack Rusk

Oiling the Seagram Building's bronze facade is slow, expensive, and extraordinarily labor-intensive. According to the building's specifications, the oiling is a nearly constant activity. The Seagram, exemplar of the machine age, has long been lambasted for the amount of handwork that goes into maintaining it. We see the same problem differently: Can the constant work of caring for buildings—from cleaning to repair to retrofit—upset the idea of the single-authored 'work' of architecture?

This isn’t just a theoretical notion, but an urgent necessity. "The case for a fix-it first agenda," writes Billy Fleming, "is economic as well as ecological." In New York City alone, the retrofit market is expected to grow to almost 20 billion dollars by 2030. This market is enormous, but there isn’t enough skilled labor to perform the retrofits. Placing a construction training program at the heart of the building, we propose using the Seagram as a laboratory to train this workforce. In the upper floors, we reorganize office floors into living spaces. Where elsewhere in Midtown, commercial-to-residential rezoning is squandered on speculative developments, we use the same law to provide workforce housing for those working in the new "fix-it first" economy. Motivated by the idea that maintenance isn't a singular event but implies practices from repair to reconstruction to domestic living, this proposal displaces the ‘project’ of Mies' architecture with an open-ended practice of remaking. Collaborator: Heather Schneider

Rendering of a dim timber-clad corridor opening onto a warm-lit construction training hall with a pallet jack — from Jack Rusk's 'Like an army of soldiers or like a meadow' (Yale School of Architecture, Fall 2021)

Floor plan of a housing floor (Floor 21) in the converted tower, with units around a central core — from Jack Rusk's 'Like an army of soldiers or like a meadow' (Yale School of Architecture, Fall 2021)

Rendering of curtain-wall testing inside the tower, with steam, scaffolding and a worker at a mock-up — from Jack Rusk's 'Like an army of soldiers or like a meadow' (Yale School of Architecture, Fall 2021)

Rendering of a sunlit housing floor with tall curtains and a child sitting by the glazing — from Jack Rusk's 'Like an army of soldiers or like a meadow' (Yale School of Architecture, Fall 2021)