Handed a former commercial floor just south of Empire State Building we walked into a chopped up environment with rotted floors and open bathrooms. The space had not been touched since an initial conversion from light commercial manufacturing to residential – quasi squatter paradise. While the building was intact, we found ninety percent of the unit substructure rotten, the pipes damaged, all the walls a wreck and a toilet hanging out in the middle of open space. Dismantling and re-imagining the space within the confines of the building structure gave us a great rubric to test design ideas against.