The studio identifies a “ruined” site in Staten Island: Hoffman Island and Swinburne Island, artificial landforms built from landfill approximately four miles offshore. From the 1860s to the 1920s, these islands served as extensions of the former quarantine hospital at St. George, established in response to local resistance to immigrant populations. This NIMBY-driven public health logic, which incorrectly attributed disease transmission to proximity and air, spatially excluded vulnerable groups.
The islands are thus understood as the ruins of institutionalized neglect that prevented the arrival to a promised land. The project reframes this history through the waqf, an Islamic charitable endowment that freezes land for public benefit in perpetuity.
Fieldwork with Staten Island Muslim community centres identifies refugees trained in health sciences but lacking U.S. accreditation as beneficiaries. A distributed waqf network of accessory parcels with their right of ways is established around the Muslim American Society of S.I., deploying prefabricated housing and educational and health programs to support accreditation and community care.
