Nida Ekenel is an architect living in New York. Ekenel’s work speaks to spaces of material histories—from salt extraction to paper production, to waste management. Her research has been published in Funambulist, MIT Thresholds, and UCLA Pool, and her collaborative projects have been exhibited at the 16th Venice Architecture Biennale, 2023 Harvard Arts First Festival, and 4th Istanbul Design Biennial. She holds a Master of Architecture from Harvard Graduate School of Design and a Bachelor of Architecture from Istanbul Technical University, with international studies in Lisbon and Tokyo.
About The Fugitive Half-Life of Salt :
The Fugitive Half-Life of Salt reveals the salt mountains that lay across New York City, transplanted to the city's shores from mines as distant as Tarapacá, Chile. These migrant minerals are stored in industrial sheds across the five boroughs in anticipation of inclement weather. Before the road salt is scattered atop the city to disappear snow and ice, the salt mountains are themselves disappeared under the watch of a maintenance infrastructure that keeps them inaccessible to the public. Road salt, in fact, is most topical and talked about where it is absent: in the piles of snow and on the patches of ice that accumulate.
The selected pieces are an excerpt of a larger research that looks at this mineral's environmental shift. It traces road salt’s odyssey in three appearances: the borrow pit where it is first extracted; to the sheds in which it is stored; and to the grid onto which it is scattered. The narrative unfolds with the reappearance of a previously demolished salt shed situated on the Gansevoort Peninsula, near the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan. On a site where disappearance takes multiple forms, the proposed design project ensures the resurfacing of the salt on the building’s skin and invites the public within its walls to witness the mineral’s enduring presence.