VeA es un Estudio multidisciplinario de diseño con el objetivo principal de desarrollar proyectos capaces de transmitir y resolver los requerimientos de las personas que los habitan.

Elsa Ponce’s The Bower is a temporary structure meant to create a more livable urban environment as the city warms. (Carlos Galek Sefchovich/Courtesy Studio Elsa Ponce).

A weekday in Foley Square is relatively still. The plaza is a place that people pass through on their way to jury duty or the subway, or to get married.

This August, that changed. When NYCDOT’s Summer Streets closed the corridor running from the Brooklyn Bridge to Inwood, Foley Square traded its usual hush for bike bells.

And shading part of the square was Elsa Ponce’s The Bower, a temporary structure meant to create a more livable urban environment as the city warms. (The installation ran from 7 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. from August 8–15, before coming down each day.) The device was nomadic: It was temporarily deployed in both Foley Square and on Park Avenue.

Ponce, an architect and educator, runs Studio Elsa Ponce, a New York-based practice working at the intersection of architecture and social practice. (She was also a co-founding member of WIP Collaborative, a group of independent designers, which recently announced it is closing.)