Cortez, in 5 parts

Columbia GSAPP
Critic: Kersten Geers, Andrea Zanderigo
Spring 2019

For the latest installment of Kersten Geers’ ongoing project “Architecture Without Content”, this studio entitled America Deserta explored the metaphor of the American West.  Starting the project with a selection of artworks from Geers’ Redcat show, I chose to take Ed Ruscha’s Eleven Pieces of Cheese and Bas Princen’s photo Ringroad (Houston) as precedent. This studio’s brief held a utopian intention, take a disaggregated desert town mentioned in Reyner Banham’s Scenes from America Deserta (Cortez, Colorado) and densify all of the town’s programs into a single mega-structure. 

 






To achieve this, I propose five grosseforme objects, each composed of three parts: a base, a middle, and a top. Drawing from Ruscha, the notion of composition of parts signifying a greater whole became a generator for design.The challenge was to identfiy and create distinct, urban scale units that share the same “DNA”, akin the the cheese.  Placing these five objects along a central main street, the road becomes a conduit of infrastructure and interconnection, spatially linking each structure. The road in conjunction with the generic figures mark a distinct territory through the Colorado desert, similar to how Princen leverages Houston’s ring road to achieve a similar language. While these objects share a typological consistency, the top portion becomes a figural identifier. Each hat separates the building and provides a unique spatial condition for the inhabitants.