Samuel Choi

MArch Architecture

Hidden Systems

Across buildings and cities, moisture is managed, concealed, and discharged through convoluted systems of containment. Still, water ultimately resists this framework. It reveals itself as leaks, puddles, condensation—moments typically understood as technical failure. Hidden Systems reframes these conditions as architectural knowledge, one that becomes evidence of water’s material capacity, limits of infrastructure, and a record of time.

NYC is constructed on, powered by, and profiting from water. Although it hosts a robust network, seepages disrupt control, allowing systems to be traced across scales. As pipes expand, contract, and freeze, the project unfolds seasonally, moving through water’s three states: solid, liquid, and gas.

What follows proposes architecture not as a perfectly sealed object, but as a medium of constant negotiation with its environment. The interventions within the city conceive water infrastructure as design opportunities, building legibility to necessities often disregarded. They are architectural responses that embrace water’s agency.

Blue-toned poster layering abstract infrastructural forms, halftone textures, and condensation effects to reveal hidden urban water and civic systems.

Animated split-screen composition juxtaposing images from the RISD Picture Collection against black-and-white architectural drawings. Depicts nodes within water infrastructure, indicating points of engagement within the larger network.

Artifact 01: Index of Nodes

Video of orange-and-white steam stacks on a white box platform. Steam is generated inside the box, and is released through the steam stacks above.

Artifact 02: Con Edison Steam Stacks

Photograph of an orange-and-white steam stack in the foreground, and a map of Manhattan in the background. The map portrays water systems within the island, identifying supply, points of control, and escape.

Artifact 03: Map of Manhattan

The project unfolds by examining excess of water within New York City. Taking "building with water" as a prompt, leaks and overflow become a generator for design interventions.

Animated orange-and-white striped warming station, alluding to the Con Edison steam stacks previously studied. The tensile structure combines various material transparencies for circulation, warmth, and program.

Excess of Steam: Warming Station

Animated bucket pavilion visualizing various states of rainwater collection. The structure is made of silver circular tubing and blue fibrous material to hang each bucket.

Excess of Water: Bucket Pavilion

Rendered puffy architectural form surrounded by animated snowfall and snow piles, exploring accumulation, atmosphere, and snow as a temporary architectural material.

Excess of Snow: Windbreaker

A series of four elevation studies showing vertically stacked water towers exploring variations in density, visibility, and expression of infrastructural systems.

NYC Department of Water

Learning from how the smaller interventions engage with smaller forms of excess around the city, the NYC Department of Water building engages with a larger excess: the flood. This building becomes an archive of water and water technologies, housing the smaller interventions that can be deployed, and alleviating an inch of sea-level rise for ten Manhattan city blocks.

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