Rewriting The City

People wander. They get distracted. And lost. Walking in circles they trace and retrace their steps. As a practice of profound significance, the ubiquity of walking does not negate its potential to represent human diversity. Walking is almost always improvisatory, while subject to evolve and shift to accommodate for the environment and individual experience. Meanwhile, buildings have a reputation of permanence and stability, often imposing a functionalist order onto the site. As a result, person movement becomes codified by reductionist circulation diagrams which divorce the social and experiential from the data of going somewhere. Walking is at the core of inhabiting architecture, yet no one ever asks why and how people walk.

The proposed design inscribes itself into the landscape through broad gestures, eroding space by tracing and retracing the pedestrian circulation - Site Plan 1:500

The shifting of culture, spoken languages, and erosion of the site juxtapose the heavy elements embedded into the landscape creating a symbiotic relationship between landscape, construction, and circulation.– Section 1:50

The operation of walking captured by the wandering line and fragmented injections into the site give rise to cross-cultural encounters, unplanned routes, and learning - Group Site Model 1:500

Collectively, this alternative mode of inhabitation along a single line rejects the homogeneity of modernist architecture, instead welcoming disparate facets of identity, language, routine, and spatial practices.

Typical circulation diagrams presume people walk within the confines of straight lines and arrows, ignorant of nuanced spatial practices. Such a homogenous occupation is in direct opposition to the flux of Auburn’s streets.