Habitats Unveiled

Medical Laboratory
Central Park

Like a silent graveyard, Central Park’s Reservoir has been quarantined from public use. But if its hard edge were frayed, exposing water to land, it could embrace the city’s daily tides of existence—it could be brought to life.

The reservoir will become a permeable habitat of fish and bird sanctuaries that consume bodies donated to science. Interlacing the mournful and the everyday, the veiled and the unveiled, this vertical ecosystem gradually overlaps bodies leading their second lives in medical research with the urban optimism of visitors. Central Park is pulled into the water through a ceremonial infrastructure, where it evolves from a landscape of leisure into a sanctuary of science.