Hunts Point Youth Center
location:Bronx, New York
client: NYC Department of Design and Construction
size: 20,000 sf
date: 2001
The Hunts Point Youth Center [HPYC] is a performance space, art gallery, and education center in the Bronx. The building is also proposed as a ‘virtual forest’.
The site is the Julio Carballo Fields, a park managed by the Parks Department of New York. The building occupies space that had been part of a public park, so the building was designed as a ‘virtual forest’ in order to give back the land that it occupies, virtually, as a forest.
The sense of a virtual forest was created through the manipulation of light and structure. A landscaped area in front of the building includes a grid of trees that continues inside the youth center through structure and sky lighting.