Mermaid YMCA

CORE 02 STUDIO: Professor Jennifer Leung

Coney Island is a context of many dualities. It has maintained its reputation as place of escape through its beaches, amusement parks, and tourists. This image of Coney Island, however, is one that is temporal and often are forgotten the realities of this place as a neighborhood through lens of its communities and the locals. The urbanistic conditions occurring within Mermaid St., which lies north of the site and stretches east to the subway station, are a variation of storefronts that serve as a reflection of these local communities in that they display programs such as spiritual centers, beauty salons, laundromats, home-run restaurant establishments, and so on. All exist in order to accommodate the banal and daily rituals of the Coney Island residents. The Mermaid YMCA positions itself under two taxonomies in which combinations of typical Y program and “mermaid program” (as I have come to call them) are studied so that anomalies like “rock chapel” or “lift and learn” are created. The first is called 2 face and the second is called storefronts. Both catalogs were methods into understanding tools of relation between program that is ‘sacred’ vs that which is ‘profane’. The first understands the potential adjacencies through means of poche and utilizes the arch as a formal device that suggests orientation of the body and as well as scale. The second, I describe as a catalog of line types, in which the adjacencies then architecturally perform through various types display, circulation, and as well as edge conditions. Here the arch is also utilized as a threshold and in some instances performs as a place of inhabitation.

MERMAID Y PROGRAM TAXONOMIES