The NYC Compost Project sits at Vernon Boulevard and Queensboro Plaza South in Long Island City, at the edge of the Astoria waterfront and within walking distance of the Noguchi Museum and Socrates Sculpture Park. The site is already embedded in a network of cultural institutions, bike paths, and public open space. The design begins from that fact.

Working with Big Reuse and the NYC Compost Project, SPEEDBOAT developed a master plan that positions composting as a public benefit rather than a municipal back-of-house operation. The program organizes public entrances, garden areas, outdoor classrooms, protected work spaces, custom fencing, storage, and truck access into a coherent site plan legible to the neighborhood and amenable to educational programming and periodic leisure. The goal was a facility that New Yorkers would recognize as belonging to them.

The design work was developed through three primary representations: a high-resolution urban systems map illustrating the site's spatial relationships to parks, waterfront, bike and walking paths, and neighborhood institutions; a pair of first-person perspectival renderings conveying the atmosphere and feeling of the major programmatic elements; and an axonometric drawing providing full site orientation. Together the drawings functioned as design tools and as promotional material for fundraising and community engagement.