In today’s gig economy, everyone can benefit from understanding an artist’s way of life, and how living and working can be combined. A 2019 study found that 1.3 million New Yorkers (about one-third of the city’s total workforce) were freelancers relying on daily work for income. An artist’s income is similarly unstable. Many artists have moved out of city centers, including Manhattan, to be able to afford rent and adequate workspace.

 

Japanese American sculptor Isamu Noguchi faced this challenge as well. In 1961, he moved his home and studio from Manhattan to Long Island City, Queens, seeking affordable space and proximity to the metal and stone fabricators with whom he worked. Over time, Noguchi combined his studio with galleries and a sculpture garden, creating a museum environment within this manufacturing area, and eventually attracting other cultural institutions to the neighborhood.

 

Today, affordable housing of all types has become even more scarce. New York City currently has the highest level of homelessness since the Great Depression of the 1930s, and more than half of all city households are rent burdened. Newly elected and committed to building 200,000 new housing units over the next ten years, the incoming Mamdani administration considers Long Island City to be a key focus area for addressing the city’s affordable housing crisis. Within this context, the studio’s site adjacent to the Noguchi Museum serves as a critical testing ground for strategies that expand site capacity, provide artist workspace, and adapt existing infrastructure to contemporary housing needs.

 

Close to the museum and along the East River, Socrates Sculpture Park exhibits large-scale art installations and offers annual fellowships and workspace to emerging artists. Like all of New York’s waterfront, the site is vulnerable to sea level rise. Students will develop strategies for climate adaptation while studying existing warehouse buildings as potential rootstock for future grafted housing. Through this process, the studio considers how experimental artist communities can inform how architecture, shared in living and making, can shape today’s collaborative, creative communities. Designing for relationships–or in other words, ecology–is key to creating successful affordable living and working for artists and beyond.

 

The studio will travel to New York to visit the site during the week of February 23-27.