Poe Park Visitor Center
The Bronx, NY, USA
2011

The Poe Park Visitor Center, located on the Grand Concourse in the Bronx and designed for the New York City Department of Parks & Recreation, is an educational facility to support the bustling community. The 2,700 square foot building houses exhibition and assembly space, an information desk, learning areas, and support spaces for Poe Park. The north end of the structure features a large window that frames a view of Poe Cottage, Edgar Allan Poe’s last residence.

The center orients visitors within Poe Park, directing them northward toward the historic cottage or southward to an eighty-year-old bandstand that anchors the opposite end of the park. The building is composed of two separate volumes that slip between each other to express the state of flux that is characteristic of many of Poe’s stories. The two parts represent not only the opposing orientations on the site but what poet and scholar Daniel Hoffman considers the dual aspects of Poe’s work: the “grotesque,” or stories of horror that arise from ordinary circumstances, and the “arabesque,” or stories of imagination in dreamlike circumstances.

The main entrance slips into a dramatically elongated interior open space. The striking roof profile, a form suspended between ascent and descent evoking a sensation of mystery and suspense, suggests “The Raven.” Similar to Poe’s use of the uncanny in his writings, the building design incorporates materials in exceptional ways; the dark gray slate shingles used as cladding is most commonly used for roofs of traditional New England buildings.

Credits:

Design Team: Toshiko Mori, Alexandra Barker, Amy Yang, Michelle Kim
Structural: Buro Happold Consulting Engineers
MEP: Plus Group Consulting Engineering
Civil: Leonard J. Strandburg and Associates Consulting Engineers & Land Surveyors
Landscape: Quennell Rothschild & Partners

Photographs © Iwan Baan