Model detail showing participants’ proposals for housing (yellow), landscape (green), and civic (red) programs. PHOTO: CAMERON BLAYLOCK

Community Building

Architect and urbanist Marcus Wilford (B. Arch. ’16), a School of Architecture and Design alumnus and adjunct assistant professor, is no stranger to the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway (BQE).

Growing up in Brooklyn for most of his childhood, Wilford lived by the now crumbling, controversial highway (built by Robert Moses between 1937 and 1964) that runs from the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge in Brooklyn to the Long Island Expressway in Queens. “I have asthma,” he says. “These are health problems that are caused by living near a highway or massive infrastructure. Some of my relatives still live near the BQE.”

Marcus Wilford

It was this personal experience, along with his professional interests in environmental justice and community engagement, that ultimately led to Wilford’s involvement with the Modeling Community Visions (MCV) for a Future Without the BQE project with the Institute for Public Architecture (IPA). The MCV project is a series of free and open-to-the-public community design workshops that invite residents to re-envision their neighborhoods in a vibrant post-BQE future through large-scale physical models.

As part of the IPA’s broader BQE2053 multiyear project that envisions a future without the BQE and highlights the institutional segregation and environmental impacts created by the highway, it brings awareness to the historical exclusion of underserved communities in decision-making about their physical space and gives a voice to those who live near the expressway.