Architecture after Apocalypse

Date: Spring 2009

Herein lies the paradox. Every Utopic vision, whether represented through literature, film, or drawing, inevitably reveals its absence, its repressed other and denigrates to a dystopia, a supposedly perfect place that is anything but. We’re left to flounder between a prison of repressive, ideological stagnation and an inherent dream of order. The struggle, then, ignites between the human desire for coherence and its antithetical partner necessitated by the divergent and pluralistic desires of a multiplicity, between Utopia and heterotopia.

Domestic units are housed in abandoned shipping containers assembled by, within, and upon a steel megastructure that serves as a connective tissue, forged out of reclaimed steel from Pittsburgh’s many bridges. The steel structure is defined by dialectically opposing forces. The primary, linear circulation sets a singular ordering operation for the entire system, yet this global ordering device is undermined at the local level. The structure can be altered to allow shipping containers to be plugged into the ever-changing grid at any point.