Embodied Power at the River's Edge: Reimagining Indian Point

What happens to a building when its original purpose disappears? Other than becoming a costly landfill, what alternative paths exist to give such structures their next lease on life?

These are the kinds of questions that HALF – LIFE, an option studio co-taught by Architecture Professor of the Practice Florian Idenburg and Lecturer Jonathan Molloy (both of the architecture and design firm SO – IL), is exploring with twelve undergraduate and graduate students studying at the Gensler Family AAP NYC Center this semester as they consider the adaptive reuse potential of the Indian Point Energy Center.

"The studio asks students to consider the relationship between energy, material, and experience," Idenburg explains. "It's a complex studio dealing with expansive concepts of time. The outcome of the studio is very diverse. Students are picking up on different things and developing a variety of ideas, all proposing alternate futures for this complicated site along the Hudson River."

On a grey day last February, it was with this context in mind that the studio visited the plant's 240-acre property, now owned by Holtec International, a New Jersey decommissioning firm. Holtec's work of the past two years has primarily focused on the de-fueling of the plant (a process also not without contention) and the built structures have so far been left largely untouched.

"It's a very interesting opportunity to think about adaptive reuse, which is a very important type of architecture these days," notes Molloy, who grew up in the Hudson Valley and vividly recalls the controversy that surrounded the high-security site. "The most sustainable buildings you can make are the ones you don't have to build, so if you can use buildings that already exist, you can use the embodied carbon that has already been extracted from the earth to make new spaces. These are some really enormous, robust structures and a really potent site to think about what it means to reoccupy a space and using the infrastructure that's already there for some form of new life."

"Seeing these structures up close was a powerful experience," says Gabriella Kim (B.Arch. '24). "I had never done an adaptive reuse project before, let alone set foot in a nuclear power plant. I thought this opportunity to not only visit the site but to also engage with it down to every single detail would be an amazing opportunity. Based on my experience this semester, everything has aligned with my expectations; the moment we approached the giant reactors — 200 feet tall — will stay with me forever."

The literal enormity of the challenge ended up being a powerful lesson in and of itself as students worked to encompass everything about the site in their plans before realizing that part of the challenge might be letting some of it go. This led to discussions about the history of the buildings related to energy and consumption, as well as considerations of the site's larger ecology. Molloy equated tackling such a nuanced and difficult project to "running with weights on," emphasizing the value of such an exercise. "Even if the end result is less developed than you might have aspired to, it's valuable in the way that it has trained you to take on something that's more than you might have been prepared to do."

The studio asked students to first consider the design of a large-scale event in the space before tackling a more permanent-use proposal. Additional trips to locations such as DIA Beacon, an art gallery housed in a converted former Nabisco box-printing facility, and Brooklyn's Powerhouse Arts, a renovated 117-year-old power plant that now serves as a contemporary art center, encouraged the students to further expand their thinking about what was possible and how their own projects might develop.