SUN SHELTER – PIER 54
DESIGN COMPETITION – 1997
Thresholds of Transition
original competition submission poster
Posted on: August 27, 2026
Over the past four months, we have revisited early MPA submissions for ideas competitions in the late 1990s and early 2000s. This process has involved ongoing archaeology, selective digitization, weekly discussions, conversations between projects, and discoveries of affiliations.
Sun Shelter emerged as a project embodying four conceptual apparatuses that informed MPA’s thinking at the time, and are present in later built projects: Field, Ground, Language, and Collage. Interweaving Sun Shelter’s threads of Palimpsest, Veil, and Overlay, we stitch a narrative that grounds MPA’s site specific, sectional, and representational strategies.
Posted on: August 27, 2026
Over the past four months, we have revisited early MPA submissions for ideas competitions in the late 1990s and early 2000s. This process has involved ongoing archaeology, selective digitization, weekly discussions, conversations between projects, and discoveries of affiliations.
Sun Shelter emerged as a project embodying four conceptual apparatuses that informed MPA’s thinking at the time, and are present in later built projects: Field, Ground, Language, and Collage. Interweaving Sun Shelter’s threads of Palimpsest, Veil, and Overlay, we stitch a narrative that grounds MPA’s site specific, sectional, and representational strategies.
PUBLIC SPACE IS ABOUT DIFFERENCE
We have bracketed the questions of sun shelter as a public space
– of threshold, passage, and destination –
according to three related sites with their respective conceptual frameworks
– palimpsest, veil, and overlay –
moving from history to the individual to the social.
SUN SHELTER – PIER 54
DESIGN COMPETITION – 1997
Thresholds of Transition
Over the past four months, we have revisited early MPA submissions for ideas competitions in the late 1990s and early 2000s. This process has involved ongoing archaeology, selective digitization, weekly discussions, conversations between projects, and discoveries of affiliations.
Sun Shelter emerged as a project embodying four conceptual apparatuses that informed MPA’s thinking at the time, and are present in later built projects: Field, Ground, Language, and Collage. Interweaving Sun Shelter’s threads of Palimpsest, Veil, and Overlay, we stitch a narrative that grounds MPA’s site specific, sectional, and representational strategies.
Posted on: August 27, 2026
PUBLIC SPACE IS ABOUT DIFFERENCE
We have bracketed the questions of sun shelter as a public space
– of threshold, passage, and destination –
according to three related sites with their respective conceptual frameworks
– palimpsest, veil, and overlay –
moving from the history to the individual to the social.
cunard line terminal gate
∙ conceptual apparatuses ∙
∙ sites ∙
FIELD
Our proposal explores the architecture of public space by exploiting the sun shelter’s character as inherently open and partial in order to foster difference, make room for multiple identities, and retain the capacity for change. It does so while acknowledging and representing the historical and geographical specificity of the site: Pier 54, edge of Manhattan, the Cunard Line Terminal, and the Waterfront Plan.
1. PALIMPSEST
At the infill limit of Manhattan Island, an assemblage of fragments joins the skeleton of the Cunard Line Terminal with other astonishing artifacts that were unnoticed parts of its ground. This first threshold sun shelter is a wooden grid structure, the historic purpose of which was to contain the earth of the bulkhead.
3. OVERLAY
A social roof gathers diverse program elements (sundeck, water, stair, spray, pool, outdoor cinema) on multiple ground planes, allowing contact with nature – sun, wind, water – as well as gatherings of large groups of people.
• conceptual apparatuses •
• sites •
GROUND
A cut through what others saw as just a field, MPA’s intervention operated sectionally, “opening up” and extending the pier’s surface at discrete moments, allowing the interventions to reveal existing orders while establishing new ones. The column structure of the pier extends to each of these new elements, extruding the piles as water-lighting columns, and creating a sequence of thresholds from the gap to the pier’s edge.
2. VEIL
Along the northern edge of the pier, awareness of exposure to sunlight heightens the effect of shade partial transparencies condition the act of viewing out towards the nature preserve (Pier 56) as well as in; changing sources and directions of light register on bodies as well as on the surfaces of the “veil” itself.
FIELD
Our proposal explores the architecture of public space by exploiting the sun shelter’s character as inherently open and partial in order to foster difference, make room for multiple identities, and retain the capacity for change. It does so while acknowledging and representing the historical and geographical specificity of the site: Pier 54, edge of Manhattan, the Cunard Line Terminal, and the Waterfront Plan.
GROUND
A cut through what others saw as just a field, MPA’s intervention operated sectionally, “opening up” and extending the pier’s surface at discrete moments, allowing the interventions to reveal existing orders while establishing new ones. The column structure of the pier extends to each of these new elements, extruding the piles as water-lighting columns, and creating a sequence of thresholds from the gap to the pier’s edge.
LANGUAGE
The conceptual framework for intervening on site is grounded in MPA’s methodology of valuing and revaluing existing conditions. The scars of infrastructural cuts are registered in new rhetorical figures that are material and physical, not just nostalgic. Traces from existing conditions are amplified to invite different programmatic conditions, their convergence and overlap is imagined in a way that amplifies the power of each element. In harnessing the power of the infrastructural elements without domesticating them, we are situating people in an out-of-scale landscape,
COLLAGE
The conceptual framework for intervening on site is grounded in MPA’s methodology of valuing and revaluing existing conditions. The scars of infrastructural cuts are registered in new rhetorical figures that are material and physical, not just nostalgic. Traces from existing conditions are amplified to invite different programmatic conditions, their convergence and overlap is imagined in a way that amplifies the power of each element. In harnessing the power of the infrastructural elements without domesticating them, we are situating people in an out-of-scale landscape,
1. PALIMPSEST
At the infill limit of Manhattan Island, an assemblage of fragments joins the skeleton of the Cunard Line Terminal with other astonishing artifacts that were unnoticed parts of its ground. This first threshold sun shelter is a wooden grid structure, the historic purpose of which was to contain the earth of the bulkhead.
2. VEIL
Along the northern edge of the pier, awareness of exposure to sunlight heightens the effect of shade partial transparencies condition the act of viewing out towards the nature preserve (Pier 56) as well as in; changing sources and directions of light register on bodies as well as on the surfaces of the “veil” itself.
3. OVERLAY
A social roof gathers diverse program elements (sundeck, water, stair, spray, pool, outdoor cinema) on multiple ground planes, allowing contact with nature – sun, wind, water – as well as gatherings of large groups of people.
∙ conceptual apparatuses ∙
∙ sites ∙
FIELD
Our proposal explores the architecture of public space by exploiting the sun shelter’s character as inherently open and partial in order to foster difference, make room for multiple identities, and retain the capacity for change. It does so while acknowledging and representing the historical and geographical specificity of the site: Pier 54, edge of Manhattan, the Cunard Line Terminal, and the Waterfront Plan.
1. PALIMPSEST
At the infill limit of Manhattan Island, an assemblage of fragments joins the skeleton of the Cunard Line Terminal with other astonishing artifacts that were unnoticed parts of its ground. This first threshold sun shelter is a wooden grid structure, the historic purpose of which was to contain the earth of the bulkhead.
GROUND
A cut through what others saw as just a field, MPA’s intervention operated sectionally, “opening up” and extending the pier’s surface at discrete moments, allowing the interventions to reveal existing orders while establishing new ones. The column structure of the pier extends to each of these new elements, extruding the piles as water-lighting columns, and creating a sequence of thresholds from the gap to the pier’s edge.
2. VEIL
Along the northern edge of the pier, awareness of exposure to sunlight heightens the effect of shade partial transparencies condition the act of viewing out towards the nature preserve (Pier 56) as well as in; changing sources and directions of light register on bodies as well as on the surfaces of the “veil” itself.
LANGUAGE
The conceptual framework for intervening on site is grounded in MPA’s methodology of valuing and revaluing existing conditions. The scars of infrastructural cuts are registered in new rhetorical figures that are material and physical, not just nostalgic. Traces from existing conditions are amplified to invite different programmatic conditions, their convergence and overlap is imagined in a way that amplifies the power of each element. In harnessing the power of the infrastructural elements without domesticating them, we are situating people in an out-of-scale landscape.
3. OVERLAY
A social roof gathers diverse program elements (sundeck, water, stair, spray, pool, outdoor cinema) on multiple ground planes, allowing contact with nature – sun, wind, water – as well as gatherings of large groups of people.
COLLAGE
Collage is the actor that brings together the thresholds and elements identified within the urban site. Here, different components assert presence while maintaining autonomy. Each acknowledges and builds upon a trail of relations, recognizing existing conditions and responding to the histories that have produced them. By acknowledging difference and allowing a tension that creates encounters, we stage opportunities for perception and experience, offering the capacity to resonate.
COLLAGE
Collage is the actor that brings together the thresholds and elements identified within the urban site. Here, different components assert presence while maintaining autonomy. Each acknowledges and builds upon a trail of relations, recognizing existing conditions and responding to the histories that have produced them. By acknowledging difference and allowing a tension that creates encounters, we stage opportunities for perception and experience, offering the capacity to resonate.
LANGUAGE
The conceptual framework for intervening on site is grounded in MPA’s methodology of valuing and revaluing existing conditions. The scars of infrastructural cuts are registered in new rhetorical figures that are material and physical, not just nostalgic. Traces from existing conditions are amplified to invite different programmatic conditions, their convergence and overlap is imagined in a way that amplifies the power of each element. In harnessing the power of the infrastructural elements without domesticating them, we are situating people in an out-of-scale landscape.
details and axonometric of “veil” passage
