Plug Out proposes that a single building can provide the necessary ecological infrastructure for a neighborhood, allowing it to “plug out” from the city grid. Commissioned by New York’s Downtown Alliance to generate ideas for an underused site in Lower Manhattan, WORKac’s proposal is a 45-story tower composed of a series of experimental housing typologies. Each type is expressed as an independent section, rotated around the building’s core to take full advantage of sunlight and views, and to create space for different ecosystems on the roofs.

The central core is expanded to create a dense infrastructural network of interrelated waste processing, water treatment, and heat production systems, which criss-cross to generate public programs, from public baths to an urban campsite. This infrastructure performs “urban dialysis” – taking in wastewater and then feeding clean water and energy back into the surrounding district.