"The NEST: A New Fort Typology for Bartholdi's Statue of Liberty" by Ian Lai 

Since the conception of the Statue of Liberty, Frederik Bartholdi specified that the location of his sculpture had to be situated in a site away from the city. He believed that “architectural effects” could heighten the visitors’ experience through a deliberate design of the procession to the Statue.

In Bartholdi’s spirit, our project proposes an alternative island conceived as a platform, facilitating various activities and engages the aesthetic and theatrical experience of inhabiting the theater. Similarly, to the Statue’s application of novel construction methods and fabrication techniques, the project challenges contemporary construction norms, and explores alternative systems that can perform as structural and aesthetic objects.

Where Bartholdi once pushed boundaries of metal construction and geometric cladding to a worldwide pinnacle, decades have passed, and we owe it to him and his builders on take the advances of architectural design and construction to new heights for our age.