Before & After: The Epic Quest to Restore Walter J. Hall’s Legendary Lynn Hall

Finding reprieves of green and calm amid the chaos of New York City is no simple task. Governors Island, an 172-acre island just off the southern tip of Manhattan, has filled that need in recent years with a 43-acre public park filled with rolling hills, historic structures, and even a zipline. It’s only a short ferry ride from downtown Manhattan or Brooklyn’s Pier 6 to reach this car-free oasis. Instead of settling for a mere day trip, though, Collective Retreats encourages lingering for a while with its newest endeavor, the Outlook Shelter. Open from May through October, Governors Island combines lush parkland, easily bikeable paths, art installations, nap-inducing hammocks, and trendy food and drink outlets. Even with annual events like the Jazz Age Lawn Party and the Rite of Summer Music Festival packing crowds, Governors Island was devoid of overnight possibilities until summer 2018. That’s when Denver-based Collective Retreats opened the seasonal Collective Governors Island, a menagerie of rustic, stylish tents—some tricked out with private baths—featuring beds wrapped in high thread-count linens and Turkish towels.

This renovation project originates from the intervention of a pre-existent building located in the western area of Mexico City; reshaping it into a studio-house project, with clear conditions and an eye set into the pre-existing circumstances. Our design solution takes on a residential structure from the 20th century and recycles it into a project that integrates itself with its immediate natural environment, shattering the hegemony of the high walls behind which the neighboring houses hide, in order to establish a dialogue that transcends the physical limitations of the project. The variations in the depths of different planes, offer the environment a living façade, where the interior activities are guessed from the visual filters that concede intimacy to the interior spaces. The interior-exterior duality brakes its context’s routine, offering a canvas of textures where the concrete and granite give away to the mildness of the metal and the lightness of plastic fabrics. To the exterior, the housing peeks out without invading; whilst opening in the interior, subtlety exposing itself, balancing the volumes that are inserted in the site. An interplay of planes occurs inside allowing the versatility of spaces by the movement of long-distance sliding screens and wainscots formed by timber that contrast in warmth and complexity with the sobriety of the stone coatings and apparent concrete of the enclosures. A new stairway, based on steel strips, reactivates the space where the old one stood, which gave an opportunity to re-signify the ambiance of the circulations as an experience of sculptural character. The front yard of the house marks the limits of the construction and together with the water mirrors and vegetation orient the route beneath a suspended long cover. The architectural program revolves around the home in the ground floor, leaving the studio in a privileged condition towards the garden. The living spaces in the first level have terraces and views to the exterior between and through a green façade woven of plastic cables (recovering the Acapulco chair technique) that sieve and melt together the thick vegetation of the existing trees. The terraces and windows allows an optimal ventilation, illumination and contextualization between the outside and inside. In the top level, the project offers a view above itself and the wooden horizon from a roof garden that elevates to a higher plane the user’s introspection, belonging and pertinence of itself.