Staging Riis

Winner of the Thesis Prize
in Landscape Architecture

Faculty Advisor:
Danielle Choi

Spring 2025

“Staging Riis” explores the evolution of “The People’s Beach,” a compact swath of shoreline at the end of Jacob Riis Park that queer New Yorkers have visited since 1941. For nearly a century, this fragment of coast has been a public queer refuge, perpetually on the brink of erasure. This project stages Riis for the next century, as a site of coastal and cultural resilience.

The entwined calamities of swelling sea levels and rising persecution of queer people have, climatically and culturally, eroded the site. The existing and proposed gray infrastructures facilitate this erosion within a linear regulatory regime. “Staging Riis” incrementally builds on the queer tradition of cultivating piecemeal spaces through acts of appropriation and deconstruction of existing systems. Through time, the people take back the queer beach. They appropriate an Army Corp of Engineers dune and glean discarded materials from the adjacent vacant lot, turned construction staging ground. Collectively, these abandoned and regulatory spaces are turned into informal infrastructures of repose, resistance, and remembrance.

As sea levels swell, the people migrate inland to the Riis Parking Lot, a historically preserved space designed by Robert Moses. This space is incrementally deconstructed into a hybridized car park, as its 72-acre hardscape is transformed into a successional, rural refuge.

“Staging Riis” accepts the reality that queer space breaks free of formalization and cannot last in a static state – its fortification is in its fragility, which is its ability to adapt in any climate. This project utilizes transformation as a means of resistance.