INFRASCAPE
Spring 2009 | Thesis
My thesis proposes a strategy for reusing dross sites as places of urban exchange. The site is a strip in Houston, Texas along three competing infrastructure systems – a US freeway and a privatized tollway, and a soon to be built light rail extension. Rather than attempting to deny the presence of the infrastructural systems that slice through the city and the interstitial spaces that result, this thesis will take advantage of such conditions to create a new hybrid typology of the urban surface. It examines public space not as a fixed condition but rather as moments of intensity – not a singular and dense "community center," but instead a "community strip" with varying scales of influence, temporalities, and levels of user interactions. The central program, a flea market, will serve as the framework, both structurally and metaphorically, for the expansion and infiltration of the strip and other programs into the surrounding sites.