Architecture Program
Date of this Version
May 2007
Document Type
Article
Abstract
DISTRIBUTION CONCOURSE is design research thesis which proposes a reconfiguration of large “emptied-out” blocks of commercial space. Space planning strategies which have led to the emergence of commercial artifacts, such as the dead mall, are evaluated against new commercial models which rely on distribution and digital networks.
Under the premise that digital commercial practices are changing how we consider the private-sector in relation to urban infrastructure, DISTRIBUTION CONCOURSE promotes a new urban organizational scheme which may thrive in post-commercialized areas of the city.
Services such as Amazon.com and the availability of wireless internet across entire city grids have made ambiguous where private and public sector activity occurs. Cookies are place on personal computers which track consumer habits. Fed-Ex circulates consumer goods through private neighborhoods. Coffee shops are used as home offices. Lobby spaces are living rooms. The commercial event, once easily located in malls and big box stores, is becoming temporal: occurring nowhere and everywhere simultaneously.
DISTRIBUTION CONCOURSE...
1. Maps out a new trajectory using emerging global-cultural trends that problematizes the “terrain vague” of emptied out commercial zones of the city.
2. Diagrams a new set of parameters which organize a new system for inhabiting post-commercialized districts.
3. Conceptualizes a new architectural prototype which acts as an urban instrument for managing and responding to the activities and events that emerge out of the new system.
Comments
M.Arch Thesis, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, May 2007