Kieran Martin

ARCH-4980.1 | Chris Perry, Assistant Professor

SOFT MEGASTRUCTURE
Stitching Detroit’s Urban Voids

KIERAN MARTIN

This research uses the post-war avant-garde trend of Megastructure as a lens into the coupling of science and design that informed the performance and aesthetics of sixties paper architecture. Though easy to discount as a fashion, Megastructure contained innovative and technically informed concepts of post-disaster redevelopment, architecture for mobility, expendability and cybernetics: all of which are relevant today.

Megastructuralists projected lifestyles for post-industrial life, at a time when industry was in full tilt. The application of this research takes on the site of Detroit, MI, as the city that most wholly embraced the ideas of industrialization, to the point of its own demise, providing a truly post-industrial context.

The design proposal looks at the possibility of shifting Detroit away from monogamy to the automobile, and towards an urban agricultural economy. The design proposes a deployable, plug-in cable-net structure that supports varying programs from public transportation, rainwater collection, and agricultural production. Entitled soft megastructure, it is deployed in particularly contaminated or stagnant portions of the city where it plugs into the city grid to recycle rainwater and use blackwater for hydroponic agriculture. While soft megastructure produces economic and physical sustenance overhead the ground underneath is remediated and shaped by the integrated urban waterfall parks.

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