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Unlocking America's Core |
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FLATSPACE: RE-SURFACING GREY GOO INTO PUBLIC SPACE | LATERAL OFFICE Columbus, Ohio The periphery of cities are marked by a collision of urban and rural settlement patterns, often called exurban. These commuter rings have, throughout the last two decades, increasingly been supplanted by massive retail corridors. This mono-use and singular means of transport – shopping by car –systemically redefines “public” space at the margins of cities. North Americans spend more and more time within the landscape of these retail corridors populated by big box stores powercenters, and their associated buffer zones and parking lots. Whether we like it or not, they represent our contemporary public realm. In this environment, public space consists of a highly controlled and familiar homogeneous environment. The result is a flattening experience of place. The possibilities of intervening in this exurban condition, or what we call “flatspace,” on its own terms remains overlooked. At the outset, we dissected the current ingredients of this form of exurbanism to find entirely autonomous components – big box, parking lot, landscape lining. Flatspaces, driven by economy and functionality, remove any articulation of social, cultural or material specificity. In its subordination to the car and the comfort of mobility, flatspaces are places of sterile transit, or what Marc Auge terms “non-places.” The intent, however, of the interventions is not to make them contextual or regional but rather to augment and invite the potential for the unpredictable and indeterminate and to enhance their status as part of the public realm. Recognizing that this environment is determined predominantly by finely calibrated market observations and economic logic, it seemed more apt and opportune to concentrate on the experience itself. In its current format, public life in exurbia is composed of fleeting encounters of drivers jockeying for parking spaces, utilitarian dialogues at drive-thrus, and perfunctory exchanges at point-of-purchases. How can you transform this environment to respond to its unlikely status as an essential contemporary public space? This inspired several design proposals that reconfigure the “ingredients” of these landscapes. At stake is a search for new connections, experiences and definitions of public space.We selected three filters by which to modify flatspace – program, parking, and landscape. A generic case study strip of 545-acres of retail corridor in Columbus, Ohio was examined. Rather then introduce new elements, each scheme tests the modification of existing elements.The projects also seek to recognize elements of the absurd or surreal in the current conditions of exurbia - in its size, efficiency, unnaturalness - and use these as tools for subverting the current uniformity of experience. Click below to Watch Animations: |
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