Vito Acconci’s commission turns the 161 St - Yankee Stadium station into an archaeological site and dislocates walls allowing the curious to "see" the stone and steel underneath. Elsewhere, protruding and receding walls provide seating for waiting travelers. Parts of the project thrust through floors and ceilings and at one point even projects aboveground. The overall effect is as if the station has been pushed and pulled in various directions to accentuate the relationship of the building to the earth into which it has been inserted. 

This project was one of the first collaborative efforts undertaken by MTA Arts & Design. The architects, di Domenico Partners, in their redesign of the station, were challenged to open the lower levels to allow light to flow inside. 

Vito Acconci (1940-2017) was an influential American performance, video and installation artist, whose practice expanded from poetry to sculpture, architecture, and landscape design. His early performance works were characterized by existential dread, provocation, voyeurism, and boundary crossing behavior. In the late 1960s, Acconci began creating situation focused performances, most notably in the streets of New York City. These formative works document Acconci’s early explorations into boundaries and physical movement. By the 1970s, Acconci began diving further into the interactions between bodies and space, focusing on architecture and furniture design. The scale of Acconci’s work continued to expand until he was making monumental public art. From the 1980s onwards he worked on and off with Acconci Studio on large scale commissions and public projects. Named after Vito Acconci, the Brooklyn based, Acconci Studio, is a collaborative group of architects and designers.