Discontinuous Monument:
Cultural Infrastructure
Master of Architecture Thesis, 2018
Rice School of Architecture
Advisor: Jesús Vassallo
As a series of waypoints for touring musicians traveling between major music cities across the United States, this project links disparate sites into a cultural infrastructure. Sited in the no-man’s land between the interstate highway and adjacent small towns, it creates a third space for interaction between traveling urbanites and rural residents. Winner of 2019 Texas Architects Studio Award.
Following the 2016 American presidential election, countless maps circulated around social media, checkerboards of red and blue that told the story of the country’s division. The most memorable of these was published by Tim Wallace of The New York Times just a week after Election Day. In “The Two Americas of 2016,” Wallace used the election results to draw a boundary around the counties where Hillary Clinton had won the popular vote. Unsurprisingly, these areas are almost all cities and coastal zones, small in size compared to Trump’s America, which comprises 85% of land area.
Equipped with what are essentially two conceptual figure-ground drawings, each the inverse of the other, Wallace uses them to draw a map of either America. The vast territory separating Clinton’s cities becomes water surrounding islands and is christened the Wyoming Shallows or the Blue Ridge Sea. The maps speak to a desire to cleave and to forget, giving form to a feeling that urban and rural areas are so irreconcilably different, they might as well be different countries. This thesis project first asks, how might we start to stitch them together again?
We begin with a mixture of culture (music) and infrastructure (the interstate highway system). Since streaming services like Spotify have dominated the music industry, musicians are more reliant on ticket sales from live shows. Most bands pack their gear into a van and drive long distances from one show to the next, often staying in cheap hotels outside of town. These “empty” distances between major music cities are an economic and cultural opportunity. Waypoints in between cities A and B could serve as rest stops and hostels for touring musicians, equipped with performance spaces and other programs that create a link with nearby rural towns.
After studying tour schedules and interviewing friends who work in the music business, I made a list of cities where up-and-coming bands are likely to stop. Then I edited that list down to 8 cities, making journeys of about 300 miles: from Phoenix to LA, from Atlanta to Nashville, from Nashville to Louisville, from New Orleans to Houston, from Houston to Austin. Combing through satellite images of these routes, I chose sites in the no-man’s land between towns and the highway. Trying to create a neutral zone of interaction for traveling musicians and nearby residents, I did extensive design research and modeling (not pictured here) to devise an architectural language to mediate between the nowhereness of the highway and the somewhereness of the town.
The goal was to create an adaptable architecture that was recognizable but open-ended, a framework more than an object. To engage both rural residents and itinerant musicians, the program has four components: lodging and vehicle storage for the musicians, an outdoor space for performances, and an icehouse. (For those who haven’t lived in Texas, icehouses are outdoor bars. Before refrigeration was common, icehouses were the distribution points for blocks of ice to keep food cold. People would go there to pick up their blocks of ice, but stay a while to visit with neighbors. As icehouses became technically obsolete, they retained a kind of civic role in their communities. Icehouses today are basically outdoor bars that remain active during the day, and they typically consist of just a bar service area and a canopy.) In my project, the ice house draws regular visitors from the nearby town, while the lodging is for musicians who are passing through. The project takes these four building types—roadside motel, detached garage, outdoor sport court, and ice house—and atomizes them across the compound into a new synthesis, all of which is anchored by a massive roof structure, meant to help the project read across multiple scales.
