Liam is a German designer and engineer working in architecture, real estate and software.

With Arka Khorchidian.

The site is a block on East 5th Street in Manhattan’s East Village, where tenements built in the late nineteenth century still line the street. These buildings were laid out on narrow lots, typically about twenty-five feet wide, and the project adopts that width as its basic unit. The site is divided into alternating tenement-width lots, and each lot is developed as an independent stack.

Within each stack, single, double and duplex units are combined, and each stack meets the street with a reworked version of the tenement stoop. Some shared rooms belong to a single stack while others serve the whole development, so that residents can choose between privacy and a more communal life.

The façade extends the same reading of the historic type. Because the original tenement used every available foot of interior space, its exterior elements, the fire escapes, ledges and stoops, became a second place in which residents actually lived. The new façade is given enough depth to take on that role deliberately, as a row of sheltered loggias facing the street.

The Art Barge at Napeague, on the South Fork of Long Island, was founded in 1960 by Victor D’Amico, the first director of education at the Museum of Modern Art, and has offered art classes there every summer since. Its instructors, however, can no longer afford to live in Montauk or the neighbouring towns, and the studio brief therefore asked for a residence where they could sleep and eat together.

The chosen site is a field near the Barge in which the concrete footings of a dismantled television tower were never cleared. Rather than removing them, the project treats the footings as its foundation and sets a timber structure on and between them. Because the two materials age at very different rates, the building is organised around that difference: the timber will grey and be replaced over time, while the concrete is expected to remain much as it is.

The Rhine rises in the Swiss canton of Graubünden, fed by Alpine snowmelt and glacial runoff, and as it travels downstream it carries whatever the mountains shed: trees brought down by storms, debris, and in severe seasons the contents of a glacial lake. The project proposes a lumbermill at a point where the river already deposits this timber, so that both the raw material and the power to process it are supplied by the current.

Instead of being kiln-dried, the wood is seasoned slowly on open decks. As a consequence, most of the building consists of racking and open air, and the part of it that does the most work is also the part most exposed to the water. The design accepts periodic flooding as the price of that efficiency rather than trying to prevent it.

For this reason the mill is built in two distinct ways. Set into the hillside are gabion walls filled with offcuts and rejected logs, so that the heaviest part of the building is made from the mill’s own waste. Over the water, inverted timber trusses and piles are kept light enough to be replaced within a single season. In a flood the structure is intended to come apart in a predictable sequence and to be reassembled once the water recedes. Historical flood records from Ginsheim and Trebur, further down the Rhine, informed how that sequence was set.