portfolio 2018–2022
Emily Conklin
Excerpted Works
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Bio
Research
Writing
Misc.
3... Red Hook, BK 4... A Digital Museum 5... A Harlem Department Store 6... Environmental Justice Uptown 7... An Atlas
8-9... Interviews 10... Reviews/Criticism
11-12... Collage
Emily Conklin (she/they) is a journalist and design historian based in New York. Her research and writing is grounded in the study of historic preservation, including issues of maintenance, adaptability, and character. Her research positions histories and preservation as a powerful tool inciting innovation, not stagnation. This portfolio is a collection of project excerpts. Links to full documentation are supplied where possible, but hard copies are available upon request.
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Reclaiming the Red Hook Waterfront Thesis 2019 – ongoing View the complete project here.
“In May 2019, in the middle of the night, just days before the city was to vote on landmark protections for the Lidgerwood Warehouse — a prominent redbrick warehouse located at the mouth of one of the neighborhood’s most popular parks,Valentino Pier — UPS began to bulldoze. Rallying in the dark, dozens of residents and business owners persuaded contractors to halt demolition, but not before half of one façade was destroyed.
A Digital Museum
(Video:)
Perkins&Will archive and research, 2020-21. View the complete (interactive) project here.
“Since [1935], we’ve collected and preserved thousands of paper sketches, plans, photographs, notes, and even hand-drawn doodles from some of our greatest designers. We invite you to take an unprecedented tour of our archives through a curated digital museum experience.”
Containerization of shipping left Red Hook’s docks dormant by the 1960s. But the physical traces of that world which remain are invaluable—to the neighborhood and its residents, and to the city beyond, including me, a newcomer from London struck by the unexpected scale of the architecture and relationship between land and sea. The intimacy of the built environment reminds us of what we need in a community: human-scaled urbanism and the local flavors it cultivates.”
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A Harlem Department Store
Environmental Justice Uptown
Studio I – Columbia GSAPP
Studio II – Columbia GSAPP
“The formed H. C. F. Koch & Co. department store is located at 132-140 West 125th Street... the lavish Renaissance Revival style department store was the first to open on 125th Street in Manhattan and was Harlem’s main department store for 30 years.” – 125th Street Rezoning: Historic Resources (FEIS)
While Harlem has been a marshland and therefore a natural floodplain for centuries, intensive development in the last 200 years has meant that natural flood events have come with a cost to human existence in the neighborhood. The East Harlem neighborhoods between Fifth Avenue and the Harlem River, stretching from East 96th Street to East 155th Street, have been most heavily impacted.
“The formed H. C. F. Koch & Co. department store is located at 132-140 West 125th Street... the lavish Renaissance Revival style department store was the first to open on 125th Street in Manhattan and was Harlem’s main department store for 30 years.” – Significance Report, “Koch & Co.” 2018.
“STORE BOYCOTT WINS EMPLOYMENT FOR 35 HARLEM SALESGIRLS: 125th Street Department Store Yields to 8-week picket campaign
According to our geological research, this area was once the Harlem Marsh. This marsh was infilled with solid waste to “reclaim” land for Manhattan’s development. Even early in Harlem’s post-settler colonial history as farmland, the marshiest areas on the riverfront were left undeveloped. Today, the most prominent areas of land lying on the Harlem Marsh [are] occupied today by many NYCHA housing complexes, multi-family apartment buildings, and multi-use storefronts. The area is serviced by the 6 train, whose infrastructure chronically floods.
Girls to recieve same pay as whites – $14.75” – Afro-American, August 4, 1934
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An Atlas
Left: The White House, USA Right: Hanoi, Vietnam
Radical Cartographies, “Using Satellite Imagery” View the complete Atlas here.
“On February 24, 2022, the world heard the first rumbles of unprovoked invasion. Russian soldiers moved onto sovereign Ukrainian land, the tinderbox of contested borders igniting into the beginnings of war. I, like so many, was shocked and appalled. As a child of a family from Czechoslovakia (as it was once known), I feel deeply the schism that erupts when a border is split, changed, moved, expanded, toyed with, by the powers that shape our world-form. This mapping series is an archive of sorts, capturing aerial imagery of some of the great world capitols and the capitols that they at one point or another sought to integrate into empire. The pacman effect of colonization that is invisible to pectoral forms that nevertheless show each city as an independent, beautiful place stitched together of blues and greens and browns.”
Interview Series: Designer Spotlight A firm’s design storytelling series View the complete book & series here.
Left: The White House, USA Right: Kabul, Afghanistan
Left: Red Square, Russia Right: Kiev, Ukraine
Left: Westminster, England Right: Edinburgh, Scotland
Data courtesy Google Maps satellite technologies, accessed and downloaded March 2022.
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Interviews
1. 1. Perkins&Will: Yan Krymsky and the Process of Placemaking 2. 2. AN Interior: Yoon-Young Hur channels architecture into her ceramics 3. 3. Pollinate: King David 4. 4. Surface MagL Naoya Hatakeyama Looks Back to Move Forward
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Reviews/Criticism
1. 1. The Architect’s Newspaper 2. 2. New York Review of Architecture 3. Design Trich 3. 4. Reclaiming the Red Hook Waterfront
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Misc. Collage
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