Omar Garcia
Inflating the Built World
From the fourth-year undergraduate option studio The Home Is a Settlement on Turtle Island, Spring 2020
Faculty: Grant Gibson
About the studio:
This studio was rooted in the idea that for most of the two hundred thousand years of human existence, the dwelling and home life were not the reciprocal of the city and urbanity. Rather, home life or the specifics of human cohabitation were the originators of all notions of public life. Constraining our attention to pre-Columbian (and early modern) North America, this studio sought to understand how culture is prefaced by evaluations of how and to what degree private life is private.
About the project:
This proposal originates from a study of Adobe Pueblos in the American Southwest. Rather than tearing down unused or abandoned structures, these Native American communities pushed for their reuse. This is how Adobe Pueblos began to stack on top of each other, creating the classic staircase design. Taking these values of maintaining and adding to existing structures, the project speculates on how our modern world would look and behave with these values being placed highly in our communities. As property lines evaporate and easements allow for individuals to travel through other private and public spaces to get to their destinations, this new world generates unheard of adjacencies and interactions between programs, people, and the unbuilt world.