Date of Award
Spring 5-30-2020
Document Type
Thesis
Degree Name
Master of Architecture (MArch)
Department
Architecture
First Advisor
Ben Pell
Second Advisor
Lauren Bordes
Abstract
This body of work attempts to revisit the American suburban condition as a potential site of healing for the United States. Polarized politics have drawn hard lines between different groups of people in the US, typically along urban and rural identities. If the suburb is potentially defined as neither urban nor rural, what can it teach us about bridging cultural gaps that have opened up in America?
The suburb, generalized into a concept I call “peripherality”, can teach practices that are decentered and heterogeneous. Architecture, as a discipline whose role could be defined in this peripheral sense, always acting in-between and in collaboration with other disciplines, has the potential to engage with the suburban condition to put these practices in motion and become physical. Inspired by the haphazard and non-picturesque spaces of the Midwest, where factories and farms and quiet homes have managed to find their coexistence in this non-rural, non-urban matrix, this thesis seeks to promote the interstitial, the fragmented, the de-centered as a mode of practice and way of life.
Recommended Citation
Wesselman, Sam, "Specific : and practices in the urban periphery" (2020). Masters Theses. 461.
https://digitalcommons.risd.edu/masterstheses/461
Creative Commons License
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