RE-MAPPING RE-IMAGINING
Kylie Grimm
Gensler 2025 Summer Fellowship
Selected Works 2023-2024
PRESERVING PLACE, CREATING ACTION
CHINATOWN’S CLT
Philadelphia’s Chinatown has long been a vibrant sanctuary of culture, resilience, and community care in the face of systemic neglect and encroaching development. With the 76ers arena proposal, we stand at a crossroads as the forces disregarding Chinatown’s history and needs threaten to displace this neighborhood’s people, businesses, spaces, and traditions.
We propose:
An architecture of counter-hegemonic solidarity. An architecture that facilitates community knowledge production and epistemic disobedience.
An architecture organized by horizontal democratic decision-making.
An architecture that puts people over profit.
The Community Land Trust ensures permanent affordable housing for Chinatown’s residents and becomes a touch-point for community gathering, learning, political organizing, resource sharing, and play. The CLT will facilitate calls to action around Chinatown. These pixels are intended to call out spatial and social injustices, serve as a reminder, and reclaim land.
Our call to action is to preserve and protect Chinatown We must pursue architecture that centers community stewardship, prioritizes equitable land use, and respects cultural integrity. We want to secure a future where Philadelphia’s Chinatown remains a vibrant space for generations to come.
SOCIAL JUSTICE MEDIA COLLECTIVE MANIFESTO
Theory II ARCH 4120 Architecture & Spatial Justice
Philadelphia’s Chinatown is a testament to cultural resilience, community solidarity, and the ongoing struggle for spatial justice. For decades, this neighborhood has faced relentless threats of displacement and erasure, driven by development projects prioritizing economic gain over its residents’ wellbeing. This campaign seeks to serve as a living archive and a comprehensive resource that captures the community’s fight for place and belonging while shedding light on the forces that continue to shape its landscape.
Our work is informed by an understanding that space is not neutral. Histories of exclusion and power imbalances shape urban environments, and the fight for spatial justice is a claim to the right to shape our surroundings on our terms. This campaign aims to amplify the voices of those who have long defended Chinatown, offering a platform that features theoretical analyses, historical and contemporary maps, first-hand accounts, and stories from activists and community leaders. Through this archive, we aim to make visible the narratives and strategies of resistance that often go unheard.
This is not just about documenting history but also about inspiring action and fostering understanding. We seek to reveal the structural inequalities embedded in urban planning while celebrating the alternative visions for an equitable and inclusive future developed and practiced by the community.
We want to write the genealogy of resistance in Chinatown. Chinatown’s resilience against the threat of the 76ers arena is not new. However, there is a history of community organization and epistemic disobedience from Yellow Seeds to Asian Americans United and FACTS Charter School. By telling the story of resistance and linking initiatives by the Philadelphia Chinatown Development Corporation, the Holy Redeemer Church, the Asian Arts Initiative, and many more community organizations, this campaign hopes to stitch together that history.
We invite you to engage with this archive not as a passive observer but as someone who bears a crucial responsibility to advocate for and support spatial justice. This is a call to recognize the impact of our built environments on cultural survival and to stand in solidarity with communities fighting to protect their spaces.
This campaign stands in solidarity as a resource, a call, and a commitment to preserving the cultural and spatial integrity of Philadelphia’s Chinatown, now and for future generations.
Explore the website: https://philadelphiachinatownsocialjustice.myportfolio.com/
N 40th St.
West Girard Ave
ParksideAve
Facade Attachment Detail
Community Connection Program Diagram
Physical Model
Physical Model Screen
Façade Detail
Courtyard Elevation
ParksideAve
PRESERVING VIEWS OF PUBLIC ART
Since 1986, Mural Arts Philadelphia has supported the cultural production and preservation of public mural projects in Philadelphia. On the site is the Black Family Reunion Celebration mural. Originally painted by the National Council of Negro Women in 1988, the mural depicts a composition of framed family pictures depicting marriage, children playing, family portraits, and slavery. This mural references a collective memory of the community and looks towards the future as the upper right of the mural begins to flip like a page of a book. Understanding the importance of keeping public art public and the significance of the mural to the community, the Arts Center preserves street viewpoints, framing the framed images and revealing the entirety of the mural as one enters.
Balcony Viewpoint
Gallery: Art by Tashia Rayon at BLURTH
MEMORY MARKET
MILL CREEK MARKET
During the 1860s, the regulation of ascents and descents of Philadelphia covered Mill Creek and converted it into a combined sewer that now runs under houses. It pushes and pulls at street surfaces, re-surfacing periodically as sinkholes that swallow trucks, as geysers in basement fixtures, or as cave-ins that collapse Row Homes and claim lives.
A mapped analysis shows cave-ins are more likely to occur closer to the creek and in the most harshly redlined areas, correlating with low property values today.
A community has a collective memory.
The market is cut through with a representation of the old Mill Creek path. The river’s edge is dotted with reflection pools representing the cave-ins. The gridded plan is reminiscent of William Penn’s original plan for Philadelphia. Like the creek running under private property, the grid is disrupted as it gets closer to the creek. The land is built up and cut into, representing the cut and fill of the city— the column structure shifts, denoting where the current sewer runs below.
The market serves as a memorial to the victims of the sinkholes while also providing a water capture system and rain garden, taking stress off of the combined sewer and reducing flooding in the neighborhood.
Critics: Elizabeth Lovette & Halee Bouchehrian
Location: 4800 Market St, Philadelphia
Duration: 18 weeks
Programs: Rhino, Grasshopper, Lumion
Wayne Daniels *
Cheryl Daniels *
Anna Robinson *
Jesse Robinson *
Albert Piccioni *
David Krause *
Lousie Thompson *
Nannie Russell
Jesse Sweard
Mary Daniels
Eugene Haley
James Wilson
Joan Wilson
Stacy Wilson
Dorothy Wilson
Wiola Mclver
Marie Green
James Morris
Roy Johnson
Willie Burney
*
Unnamed
Black
site. The site sits downhill, allowing pipes to collect storm water from the street and bring it into the cistern system. Accompanied by a permeable grass area and a large rain garden, the site can absorb more water than what falls directly on it, allowing it to collect water off the street and reduce neighborhood flooding.
Raingarden
Shredded Hardwood Mulch
Washed Sand Basin
REVOLUTIONARY STORIES
In celebration of Morristown’s history and the 250th anniversary of the American Revolution, the exhibition highlights the untold stories of Morristown. The exhibition looks to educate, inspire, and spur the desire for the community to organize and transform the future of Morristown. The exhibition utilizes themes of “revolution” and its various interpretations: Revolutionary War, Revolutionary Inventions, and Revolutionary Stories.
The exhibition follows a timeline of Morristown’s history, beginning with a land acknowledgment to the Munsee Lenape. It tells the story of the Revolutionary War, Washington’s winter encampment, inventions such as Morse Code, and the untold stories of significant community members and organizations like the Seeing Eye Institute.
Interactive exhibitions engage visitors by catering to various age and interest groups. The flexible community space hosts small businesses and community events such as Market Street Mission meetings. After the exhibition, the app can be used to experience and learn about landmarks, untold historical events, and community members of Morristown.
INTERACTIVE COMPONENT
PRIMARY CIRCULATION
SECONDARY CIRCULATION
VACANT
PLAYA BOWLS
VACANT
LOBBY
VISITORS’ EXPERIENCE
When engaging with museum spaces, visitors have different motivations and desires. To accommodate various experiences, interactive exhibitions appeal to many age groups and audiences, as defined by John Falk’s Identity and the Museum Visitor’s Experience, 2013. Facilitators are socially motivated to enable the experience of others, such as a parent with their child. The Build a Log Cabin Shelter interactive exhibition is geared towards younger children who can build a structure, and the parents can read the historical facts on the logs. Experience Seekers visit the museum as a destination and look for that social media moment, the interactive Morse Code game Professionals are closely tied to the museum’s content through hobbies or professions, such as the living history exhibition. Rechargers use the experience as a spiritual or restorative moment of contemplation. They might spend time in the vault telling their story or the story of a loved one. Explorers are curiosity-driven and want to fuel their learning experience, like using the app to explore the town.
Experience Mapping
LIVING
HISTORY
Archival research revealed that Morristown had many untold stories that had been subsumed in the town’s history of the Revolutionary War. The exhibition begins with a land acknowledgment to the Munsee Lenape and a description of the acts of violence and displacement against them. Constance Brown was Morristown’s first African American woman to serve in an integrated women’s army. James Gregory was Morristown’s first African American Police officer. The first aqueduct in New Jersey would not provide water to people of color. Mine Hill Tavern was the first gay bar that served as a haven for the LGBTQA+ community. Headquarters Plaza urban renewal displaced low-income families and cut them off from the center of town and green spaces. The interactive exhibition of living history extends this rich history to the museum visitors. They can listen to the histories of influential community members. They can also enter the bank vault, which was existing on the site, and tell their history.
Living History: Listen
Community Room
App
OUR SITE
FORD MANSION
SCHUYLER-HAMILTON HOUSE
THE PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH
DICKERSON TAVERN
“A PATRIOT’S FAREWELL”
ARNOLD’S TAVERN
“THE ALLIANCE” FORT NONSENSE
