bbPARKING The big box retail has been devouring the American landscape and communities. It indulges itself in the most fundamental paradigm of consumer culture - the monotonous sequence of drive, park, purchase and drive. It has proven to be a maddeningly successful model of business, but has perpetuated the stamping of no-man’s land across communities - it is a standard to size the parking lots to accommodate for enough cars during holiday seasons, a maximum occupancy situation which would only occur on the very rarest of occassions, if at all.
bbPARK(ING) uses Wegman’s of Ithaca, New York as a case study location. The project’s investigation begins its trajectory by examining and uncovering the inherent rules of logic embedded within the specific context. In the seemingly homogeneous field of elements of the parking lot, there is in fact a gradiation of constituents resulting from adjacencies of the context.
As a means of re-appropriating the parking lot for the larger community, a second layer of investigations are executed to uncover the rules of logic inherent to pedestrian culture. An exercise in superimposition of the rules and logic of pedestrian and leisure culture, and that of the parking lot results in the flexible product of a re-organized parking lot for alternate usage. What results is (sub)urban prosthetics.
2010

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