CONCEPT // Community design seeks to justify means of necessity in the face of political dicotomy and economic strife. Authors in response to the growing concerns of America’s urban scarcity, such as Richard Sennnet, Leonie Sandercock, and Jane Jacobs, evaluate community design as an important instigator in the face of social awareness. In the tragic wake of 9-11 and the bipartisan division in government elections, it is clear that there is a growing awareness toward that of community wholeness and the placement of self within. In response to degraded urban environments, there is a need to re-evaluation what context is deemed necessary and valuable. In this charged social atmosphere, the potential agendas of design criteria must be publicly and politically recognized.
SITE // Sited in Washington DC, this thesis documents an urban condition of segregation and gentrification. In relation to the transitional nature of the site, the architecture simultaneously explores the role of boundary in relation to political identity and cultural diversity. As a systematic concept, the architecture [1] re-evaluates the essence of community on a local scale, providing growth for national and global reponse and [2] accesses the value of self in response to changing and challenged social identities, an issue heighted in awareness by post 9-11 environment. The architecture seeks to answer how our built environment, now acting as a force both brutal and beautiful, can neutralize globalized conflict of space while still maintaining value inherent in the individual user monologue.
As a general observation, the city is extremely eclectic. However, the conglomeration of this diversity gives rise to ethnic, economic and social stratification oftern recognized as segregation through gentrification, irresponsible urban planning and racial distinction. Examining the boundaries between unstable and stable urban zones could be unique and consequently productive for a heightened awareness toward economic and political diaologue between such distinct communities, a point rich in subject for the improvement of improvised cities.
DESIGN // The architecture, responsive as need specific space, encourages provocative encounters through a didactic process of experience and time related phenomenon. The interaction gives chance to expose and exchange the self and allows the architecture to display and displace the binary logic through which identities of difference are often constructed by emphasizing a mutation. Simultaneously, the program develops economic-driven relations between identities to dispel improvised conditions in the urban community.
Due to the variety of urban needs, the architecture is designed as a prototypical unit, able to expand over time in response to adjusting communities. In the case of this thesis, the built unit supports the functions of a soup kitchen, a restaurant and a grocery store. In other cases, however, a library, a literacy center and classrooms may be inserted as program into a simiilarly constructed unit. In each unit, a three foot wide truss form weaves throughout the architecture, maintaining the individuality of each program while expanding the typical wall, what usually is idle, into a dynamic ’third’ space for exchange and displacement. Composed of multiple mobile storage boxes, the structural system allows the grocery store on the thrid floor to supply food to the soup kitchen that in turn supplies meals to the community; the architecture, maintaining the system from the ground up, references a symbolic and literal community foundation.
Consistently altering its formal context, the architecture exploits diversity by monitoring and collecting change and interaction as positive human traits. Though diverse energies, the architecture looks to dynamically blur social boundaries, actively exposing the economic and political downfalls as common ground on which to develop interaction and dialogue. The boundaries, lacking identification, inform the architecture to this nameless quality, delving positive value for the neutralization of a common ground.
PROGRAM // The program seeks to instill a nameless quality to space through hybridity. The architecture displays and displaces the binary logic through which identities of difference are often constructed by emphasizing a mutation. Simultaneously, program develops economic-driven community relationships, providing space for dialogue to dispel dire conditions. The mutation of program is organized through a process indicated by the following equation:
“habitual reference + disturbance = mutation”
The user is able to reference normality through everyday habitual agendas but is unable to name the space due to a disturbance in the common program and visual architecture. The hybridity of stereotyped program such as office space, hospitals, child care facilities, café, kitchens is not only physically provocative through encounters in the architecture but also gives to the viewer, through a didactic process of experience and time related phenomenon, the chance to expose and exchange the self.
Each prototype is structured around the exchange mechanics of a post-office. The concept of the mailbox, retaining its function as a recieving and sorting device, is transformed to act as a reference to normality while the typical post-office functions are erased from the program leaving the community to ponder the existence of the mechanical boxes. The structural foundation of the building is composed of these mobile units. For those living within the bounds of the communities, (the homeless, the school children, the working class citizens, the rich and the poor), the box is a neutralizing element, its basic use able to be referenced by all memebers. Additionally, in response to increasing gentrification, a series of mobile, community run programmatic elements (a soup kitchen, a daycare unit, a adult literacy center, a playground, a music studio) use the building as a deployment/docking station. In this case, the soup kitchen prototype is being presented. The mobility of these units develop
- a nameless quality for they are disengaging the building from a static program by consistently coming and going on a daily basis and continually changing the content of space and,
- an act of disturbance/blurring/awareness both within the architecture structure and within the framework of the urban grid.
The liminal space, the in-between of mobile and static program, becomes symbolic interaction; the hither and thither of the communities. The temporal movement and passage prevents primordial polarities and encourages human displacement. The interstitial space imposes collaboration between fixed identities, posing the possibility of a cultural hybridity that entertains differences without an assumed or imposed hierarchy. In fact, all that controls is in effect the architecture, its character a watchtower of sorts to stimulate value development and dialogues of difference across social and economic boundaries.
The building is a rich integration of precinct workers, inhabitants and visitors, the proletariat and bourgeoisie culture; a complex interaction generated by the illustrative and, at times, disturbing composition of the building’s emotive actions.
