Before these houses and these spaces, commissioned by Peter Augustus Jay, his grandfather — and father of John Jay — Peter Jay,
commissioned a property for his family. It was known as “The Locusts”, for the tallest of locust trees growing by the front porch of the mansion.
When a historic gale hit the property, the tallest of locust trees started falling — within only feet of the mansion.
In the newest Peter Augustus Jay mansion, these tallest of locust trees are gone, yet his desires to maintain the back porch as
a facsimilie of the original mansion’s original front porch frame/re-frame our views in a new way; that is, in a way that lets us be
within and without John Jay’s own views — literally, figurally, figuratively, critically.
Here, this framing/re-framing leads into a center for learning/un-learning/re-learning where the architecture wrestles with the site
similarly to how John Jay was wrestling with slaving/slavery in his family and in the colonies and his beliefs against it, and with
whether or not the colonies could be apart from, and not a part of Britain.
As the exhibition of John Jay's thinking evolves, the exhibition recombines/recombinates the elements of architecture and programme
so that the site, the site's history, and the spaces cannot exist without the other.
critic: Mark Rakatansky ( Mark Rakatansky Studio )