Doom Doom Boom

Undergraduate Thesis Studio

project brief: architectural agency
site location: just outside of sioux falls, south dakota
category: undergraduate project
context: architecture’s complicity with capital
collab: in collaboration with cassandra rota & kristina dittrich

The Wallenberg studio honors Raoul Wallenberg, a 1935 architecture graduate of the University of Michigan and one of the 20th century’s most outstanding humanitarian heroes. In the spirit of his work, the focus of the 2018 studio was ‘Agency’: What agency do architects have? What capacities or obligations does architecture have to act? Using what tools? What new and emergent forms can architectural agency take in positively shaping the future?

Addressing architecture’s contingency on power and capital, Doom, Doom, Boom explores ways the discipline might negotiate, hack, and divert assets in order to advocate for the common good.

identifying a global trend

In an age of increased anxiety, a global phenomenon of doomsday preparation manifests in widespread investment in costly defense architecture, often underground. These luxury bunkers are being constructed at a multitude of scales, budgets and foresights, which were researched and arranged within a cartogram of anxiety.

The most curious statistic that emerged from this research was the common thread of five to ten year leases for escape bunkers, as though the apocalypse would be obsolete in less than a decade

In keeping with this curious statistic of limited fear timelines, sociological fear was tracked through film themes - analyzing the threats of popular films through the past century lead to a discovery that fear over certain destructions does indeed have a lifespan - and that lifespan is indeed only about ten years.

Armed with the knowledge of rapidly evolving fears, the research set out to determine a solution to a system that was rapidly pumping money into an anxiety that would be obsolete within the decade - to position a design that could alleviate the threat for a decade, and then be transformed to reroute and continue the benefits of investment  to the larger population.

finding a wedge for interference

In this scenario, architectural agency is situated in identifying and redirecting the flow of capital being invested in defense spaces with high costs, restrictive programs, and short lifespans. The proposal modifies these existing exclusionary typologies into spaces capable of benefiting a greater number of people.

A perfect site for investment in both phases of the design, Sioux Falls, South Dakota sits within the safest geologic zone in America, and is facing the destruction of its arts programs with the impending elimination of the National Endowment for the Arts.

As both tax rates and public arts funding decrease, we see a rise in tension and unequal access to cultural activities across the United States. This tension has brought forward a culture in which the wealthy are no longer investing in cultural placation, but rather in their own security.

Doom Doom Boom designs a building with the capacity to eventually undergo a phase change, allowing it to exist initially as an investment in personal security, and later as one working towards the community’s greater good.