Souvenirs: New New York Icons was a 2017 exhibition at Storefront for Art and Architecture in New York City that commissioned more than 59 artists, architects, and designers to create objects reimagining the city’s iconic imagery, each linked to a specific community district. The exhibition challenged conventional tourist souvenir tropes by proposing new visual and conceptual icons grounded in the city’s cultural, social, and urban realities. Visitors voted on the works they felt best represented New York, with the highest-ranked selections sent to the mayor. Invited to participate, Abruzzo Bodziak Architects focused on the South Bronx, addressing homelessness locally and citywide through two models: one conveying the scale of the crisis, and a second offering a first-person perspective on the meaning of home. The gallery text that accompanied the project is below.

The Bronx leads New York City’s five boroughs in sheltered homeless. With a population over 19,000 people, the number of shelters in the Bronx is three times as many as Manhattan, and twice as many as Brooklyn.

While the area of Community Board 9 has fewer shelters than surrounding neighborhoods, it is among the highest in the use of cluster housing (privately-owned apartment buildings used to house homeless families), with 25 clusters currently in use. While this makes sense given the makeup of Bronx’s homeless population—the Bronx contains five of the citywide communities with the highest incidences of family homelessness, including Soundview in Community Board 9—the Mayor’s recent homelessness plan will eliminate cluster sites, which are inconsistently maintained and could otherwise contribute to the city’s (theoretically) affordable housing supply.

The need for building new housing—for both the homeless as well as those at risk of displacement—is urgent.

In New York City, a room for sleeping is legally defined by very little: basic dimensions and the requirement of natural light and air, which come through a window. The window is here seen as the architectural expression of home: 1 window = 1 room.

This model contains 2,520 windows, a number that may equal those homeless individuals in Community Board 9 at any one time, but only a fraction of the citywide homeless population, most recently measured at 60,856.

The lens of the window is a time-honored way to look at NYC, a city famous for its views. But a window, which qualifies a room and a view, is not afforded to all New Yorkers. The window souvenir highlights a modest window, the one that makes a home possible, that the city must be viewed through in order for it to become a more equitable, viable place to live, work, play, or raise a family.