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Route Forward :Discovering the Road as Architecture

Sczebel, Kristina

In the contemporary, technocratic understanding of the road, design is guided by a static human perspective of speed, safety and efficiency. The manuals used to determine highway construction prescribe a ‘one size fits all’ bounding box that is anti-design. With no room for nuances, unique influencers or site specific contexts the best we can hope for is a reactive mitigation of the carnage we caused in the first place. This type of infrastructure gets built to enable a more useful future, but we seldom ask, useful for whom? This project investigates the road through ‘other perspectives’ in order to synthesize a wholistic understanding of the road. Before we jump to future interventions, I want to challenge that we must understand the weight of what’s at stake. We must acknowledge the impacts, contradictions, skewed perspectives and the habitual activities that have stood as barriers to the evolution of asphalt from road to route. When we allow these perspectives to inhabit the imagination, we can move towards a more wholistic definition of road.

Text

University of British Columbia. ARCH 549

Vancouver : University of British Columbia Library

10.14288/1.0432062

Applied Science, Faculty of; Architecture and Landscape Architecture (SALA), School of

Unreviewed

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/