The Arrival Corridor

Degree Project — The Arrival Corridor: Rethinking Assimilation in the Urban Core Spring 2026, with Moe Htut

Selected for Pratt Design Award Show 2026

New York has no architecture built specifically for immigrant arrival. The spaces that currently handle it, Port Authority, the Roosevelt Hotel, emergency shelters, were repurposed under pressure and it shows. This project starts from the argument that how a city receives people shapes whether they ever feel they belong to it.

Port Authority was already functioning as an arrival point. In 2022, over 237,000 migrants were bused from Texas and dropped off there. Rather than building elsewhere, we carved into the existing terminal: a diagonal corridor cuts through the third and fourth floors, connecting the bus platforms, street entries at 40th and 42nd Street, and the roof into one continuous loop. The diagonal comes from Broadway, which crosses Manhattan's grid at an angle and has always generated a different kind of street life because of it.

The program is a sequence. Arrival center on the third floor handles orientation, translation, legal intake, and rest. The learning center on the fourth floor covers language, job readiness, and digital literacy. Short-term housing lines the front edge of both floors, designed for stays up to thirty days. The roof holds a public market open to everyone, structured along the same diagonal spine. The corner at 42nd and Eighth Avenue is cut away, making the act of arriving visible from one of the busiest intersections in Midtown.

The project understands itself as a first step, not a complete system. From the Arrival Corridor, people move outward into neighborhoods that already have established immigrant communities and support networks, places like Jackson Heights and Corona in Queens, where the social infrastructure for longer-term settlement already exists. The building gives someone enough footing to take that next step.

Total intervention: 392,000 sq ft across three levels.