THRESHOLD
New York, USA . 2016
In collaboration with the Lower East Side Girls Club and Heliotrope Foundation
The Threshold is an entranceway to a community garden that breathes new life into this space and introduces NYC to a unique material: Bamboo.
This experimental structure was designed and built together with a group of young women from the Lower Eastside Girls Club as part of a 10-week class in Sustainable Architecture. The class was created by Bryan Welch, educator-in-residence at Lower Eastside Girls Club and creative director of Heliotrope Foundation. Threshold was a hands-on experience for the aspiring female designers aged 14-16 that allowed them to experiment with an unconventional building material. For most of them it was a first opportunity to work with tools, including power tools, and they actively participated in problem solving on a construction site.
Threshold also served as a prototype for Heliotrope's next project in Haiti. Bamboo has great potential as a cheap, renewable and resistant building material. In Haiti, as in many places in the tropics, bamboo could be used for reforestation in addition to providing locally renewable home-building resources.
Visit Threshold at The First Street Garden, 48 E 1st St., NYC
