Last fall, shortly after hearing that the famed art/performance venue Galapagos would be closing, Dan and I put together a mock “proposal” for their site as part of the Riviera Real Estate exhibit at the Riviera Gallery. The exhibit pretty convincingly transformed the Gallery space into a real estate office, with agents, keys on the wall and imaginative listings in the window and on their website. And thus The Darwin was born, a new, luxury condominium atop the former Galapagos building, where “only the strong shall thrive.”
The building features a “reclaimed” Uraguayan rainforest in the lobby, in-loft waterfalls, a rooftop zoo, solar concentrators for tanning, and my personal favorite amenity, an in-pool shark tank so you can “swim with the sharks.”
It was a lighthearted way to raise issues about green living, buildings as status symbols, and rampant luxury development, especially in this part of town. I was reminded of our little tongue-in-cheek project when I read on Gothamist that a new performance venue will be moving into the former Galapagos space, and will be called Natural Selection. I’m kind of glad no one took our condo idea seriously. I thought it had a lot of potential.
As a side note, there is a lovely bar, Oulu, with a greenwall facade in Williamsburg now.
