Europe 40 Under 40 Awards Tell a friend

New York, United States

Architects: Côme Ménage
Client: Caleb Ganzer / Eric Bolyard
Landscape Architects: Nina Kramer Landscape Architecture
Design team: Gunes Kurtulan (arch), Stan de Saint Quentin (arch), Murray engineering (Structural), Evan Akselrad (Structural)
Photographer: Zack Dezon

Past summer, architect Côme Ménage and artist Allison Newsome debuted the installation of a micro-grid rainwater utility system linked to outdoor dining structures that were built all over the world in response to the COVID19 crisis.

The structure is a model to combat runoff, flash flooding and other detrimental environmental impact caused by an excess of water. The design is meant to be a replicable and customizable template for populating the city with a network of micro green spaces having functional and social capacities. This is the first instance of a modular, movable, transferrable steel-based structure outdoor dining pavilion that found its new home in New York, SoHo.

As outdoor dining structures become permanent in many cities around the world, the project imagines a multi-ownership and multi-use assembly. The vision is for a small urban device to be deployed as a large city transformation strategy when embraced by many.