HER HOUSE
2026
New York, New York
ARC 500 Directed Research, led by Marcos Parga + Omar Ali
Section Model, 1/2” = 1’
The single-family home has historically failed women; designed to confine, isolate, and to render their labor invisible. HER HOUSE proposes a different model, centered around the female body, its needs and rhythms. Conceived as a Trojan horse, the project occupies floors 18 through 21 of the East Midtown Plaza, acting as a partial retrofit that preserves the existing structure while making room for radical intervention. Bedrooms are organized around different configurations of kinship: single women, women with children, friends, and partners. The domestic labor that has always been hidden: childcare, bathing, cooking, laundry, is pulled from private units and made communal. On the north and south sides, exterior walls are cut open, expanding private terraces into collective ones where labor spills outside, visible to the city.
HER HOUSE does not tell women how to live, it takes the labor society has always assigned to them and gives it the most significant space in the building.
Plans + Section
Collective Labor Renders
Video Summary