Building inside a park, especially in the context of the already suffocating density of Manhattan, is at least a controversial act. The complexity of the context instances has been further burdened by the previous 1968 proposal by Columbia University to create a segregated gymnasium in this portion of Morningside Park, generating tension and protests from residents, students and professors.

The idea of creating a museum serving the neighborhood in the same lot envisaged by the project of the gymnasium had to deal with these instances, and more generally with the idea of "green" architecture, seeking new forms of integration between building and nature beyond the clichés on the topic. Drawing on the tradition of the follies that usually populate American parks, the proposal provides a free composition of individual pavilions of moderate size, connected to each other through a green roof, a satirical representation of a nineteenth-century idea of green and parks as a completely artificial manipulation of nature.