The Museum of Urban Transformation is designed to sit on top of a spur of the High Line, an abandoned Freight Railroad that runs along the Westside of Manhattan.  It is located at a part of the High Line which runs East-West along 32nd Street, before turning south to run parallel to 10th Avenue down to the Meat Packing District.

32nd Street forms a dividing line between the West Chelsea gallery district, a neighborhood of relatively small-scale buildings, and the Pennsylvania railroad yards, a very large undeveloped site to the immediate North, likely to be developed for a large building type such as a convention center or stadium.

The Museum of Urban Transformation is a linear three story building that runs exactly along this urban edge and is designed to mediate these different scales of land use.  Its purpose is to increase public awareness of all aspects of urban change and the relationship between architecture and time.

The abstract composition consists of a series of galleries and connecting stairs that are clad in copper panels with metallic mesh skylights and large projecting window bays that provide panoramic views of the city at strategic points. The utilitarian steel structure of the High Line provides the building’s plinth.  The museum entrance is located at the west end where the old railroad track passes under the second story of the new building.  The composition reaches  a volumetric climax at the east end where the track bed passes over 10th Avenue, thus making possible a large gallery space uniquely located directly over the street intersection, marked with a slightly trapezoidal cubic copper mesh roof structure.

The Westside’s industrial past is epitomized by the High Line, and the unselfconsciously commercial structure reveals much about the pragmatic history of the city.  It also shows how the economy of New York has changed, and the extent to which manufacturing realities have been replaced by cultural ambitions.

By arranging galleries along the horizontal circulation spine and developing an architectural vocabulary of attenuated massing, the museum engages the linearity of the railroad bed as a metaphor for the passage of time.  A pragmatic engineering structure erected for the physical transportation of industrial freight has been radically transformed, becoming a building for the dissemination of cultural knowledge and the development of a critical history.