How can a fire station be efficiently designed so that it maximizes the throughway space of its fire trucks? The answer is lifting.

Lifting all program from the apparatus level into vertical space maximizes the logistical space of the firetrucks, providing them with double-opened lanes, as well as more space for maintenance equipment and temporary storage. In addition, the isolation of the apparatus bay as the sole footprint of the structure emphasizes its importance and relevance. Besides, New York certainly loves verticality.

The organization of the space above is orchestrated to best satisfy the overlap of two, and potentially three, principal programs: a fire station, a community center, and potentially a residential tower. The overlap of program responds to sociological needs of its context, Brooklyn, or more specifically, Community Board One.

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Like fire to a chemical reaction, the last fifteen years have seen the cultural expansion of New York City’s prominence. What originally was a tale of two cities, the relevance and prosperity of Brooklyn as New York’s rival was undermined through the 1898 great consolidation. Brooklyn, as ‘the second borough’ was a deposit for the city’s unwanted and destitute, and became socially neglected with the perpetration of a twentieth-century culture of Manhattan-centrism. Only in the recent fifteen years, a burst of gentrification in response to economic expansion of the 1990s, have socio-cultural equity swept into the boroughs and residual regions of the metropolitan area.

Red Hook, Caroll Gardens, Prospect Heights, Brooklyn Heights, Vinegar Hill, DUMBO, DoBro, Fort Greene, Bed-Stuy, Bushwick, Williamsburg, Greenpoint, nearly one-third of the geographic makeup of Brooklyn is now subject to the fiery rise of real estate prices and social consequences of gentrification– the neighborhoods that real estate developers and local New Yorkers now refer to as ‘Prime Brooklyn’. With an axis situated about Prospect Park, Brooklyn is now sociologically divided into two principal cultural zones, ‘Prime Brooklyn’ and ‘South Brooklyn’. Where Prime Brooklyn is now so incredibly ‘hot’ that some of its neighborhoods are EXCEEDING their Manhattan equivalents in real estate value, South Brooklyn, from Flatbush to Coney Island, remains urban residue for the working class.

One affordable-housing project after another, the city’s poor are becoming increasingly victimized by eviction and real estate capitalism that is seeking to brush them out of increasingly profitable neighborhoods. Irresponsible leadership on behalf of the city’s mayor and governor, who would rather spend a summer’s time fighting and quarreling than working to control the city’s gentrification process, is resulting in the massive overhaul of communities into what is not just beautiful and safe, but unfair and disadvantageous to those who had once lived there. Fort Green, Clinton Hill, Downtown, the projects that lined the commuter’s view along the B.Q.E. are now on the table for being sold to real estate developers at the expense of tens of thousands of New Yorkers living there, and little is being addressed in the interest of those residents.

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The neighborhoods to which our site belongs, Greenpoint and Williamsburg, that together comprise the first Community Board, are understood by many in the region to be the symbol, the epitome, the archetype of gentrification. What was a community of middle-to-low income Polish Americans has now been changed into a hub of artists, flea markets, biergartens, and food festivals, dramatically changing the experience of the preceding community.

What must begin with the successful design of a fire station and its facilities, must carry on to become a symbolic, culturally gestural center for the community’s  suture, the integration of different ethnic and socio-economic demographics into a peaceful coexistence. What should be seemingly easy for a city that is in actuality the most diverse in the world, is compounded by the difficulty of a social climate so determined by money, and by the controversy that surrounds the entirety of this process.