American Picnickers is my independent thesis at Syracuse University School of Architecture, which I defended on April 2014. The research was funded by the SU Honors Program’s Crown / Wise-Marcus Award Grant, and the final project won the James Britton Memorial Award for Outstanding Thesis in 2014. During my final year at Syracuse Architecture, I worked closely with my thesis advisor Professor Yutaka Sho on this project, who helped me realize that my passion for the built environment was about people and their relations to the social environment. According to Professor Sho’s remarks in the award ceremony at the Chancellor’s house in 2014, my thesis was a humorous one.
I began my research by questioning what stood out to me as one of the strangest aspects of the American society – its food. Compared to what I was used to growing up in Asia, where food usually serves as a catalyst for social interactions, group bonding, and intimacy, eating in the United States seems to be emotionally “colder”: unless in some special occasions, food in America’s everyday life is usually eaten quickly, in confined spaces, and alone.
Particularly, the practice of eating while driving fascinated me. America has the largest road network in the world and an extremely high population of commuting drivers. The roadside food business, such as Drive-Ins and Drive-Throughs, has responded to the behavioral tactics of driving and the economic efficiency of automobile-dominant cities, leading to faster and lonelier eating (in the car) that has further degraded the social value of food. When one eats her food in an asocial manner, she is also more likely to ignore the quality of her food, potentially harming her physical health over time. Such a dynamic warrants a more critical examination of the relationship between eating and driving in the American society.
(Picture credit: Dorothea Lange)
(Picture credit: Syracuse Media Group, altered by me)
For my thesis, I researched the driver population’s eating practice through a social lens, and I proposed to envision an alternative roadside food infrastructure and business model that could 1) nudge people to eat socially and form different interpersonal relationships and 2) produce a new type of space that operates at the intersection between food, the highway, and the city. Liberating eating from its confined situations is like a picnic, which means eating with others while exploring new spaces and engaging in other social activities. Picnicking is the antithesis of rigidity. My thesis problematizes rigidity in America’s roadside food industry by proposing design mechanisms that foster socialness, creativity, and spontaneity.
I chose Houston as my testing ground and did my fieldwork from December 2013 to January 2014. I targeted the commuter population on Interstate Highway 610, the 38-mile “Loop” that cuts across Houston with its magnificent 12 concrete lanes. Along the Loop I surveyed over 110 unbuilt land parcels abutting the highway – they were situated in neighborhoods of various economic, physical, and sociocultural characteristics. These lands provide readily available opportunities to establish new food infrastructures serving the countless drivers on the Loop.
My first design response was a steel-frame prototype, combined with inflatable materials, that would be placed along exit ramps and parking lots. The structure is a mimicry of the Drive-Through restaurant, but much smaller in size and intentionally simple and customizable. Local food producers – there are plenty of them in Houston – can rent these mini structures to run their establishments, adjust the structures’ heights, shapes, claddings, and visuals, and produce various spaces to vend to the drivers and people living nearby. The simplicity of these structures allows for maximal customization, creating conditions to make and sell different types of food as well as different atmospheres of eating. I call these structures “Architectural Conditioners”, and they are the first step in envisioning a new food system for the city.
Besides allowing individual vendors and customers to set up points of casual encounters, the project further encourages the commuters to eat socially by searching for the overlaps of social circles among the driver population. Although commuters tend to eat quickly and move fast, if people can find shared fragments of their busy schedules (such as dry cleaning and daycare) or some common interests (such as sports), they might be willing to eat together while doing these other things together. So, I chose a particular vacant land along the I-610 Loop as my experiment site and studied its programmatic context; it was was surrounded by car dealerships, food factories, schools, hospitals, and industrial parks. In my design, I proposed to extend these businesses and their related services onto the empty land in order to anchor the population, and the Conditioners will serve as the structural frames for the new buildings. These buildings and the roads intersect, in different ways, creating various types of connections where people meet. For example, when the daycare center and the food truck road intersect, the junction is built as an auditorium, where the vendors can teach the kids how to cook. These places essentially serve both the people who are moving fast and the population who stay for longer, allowing commuters to enjoy and attend to other activities while eating. By weaving together eating and these other activities, the design puts additional flavors to food, encouraging the commuters to eat socially.
When the buildings and the roads form a grid, they leave open spaces in between, which provide opportunities to grow food on site. These small farms initiate further interactions between different social groups. Because the farms are always in between two buildings in this design, I propose that the neighboring buildings’ owners shall co-manage the farm. The Conditioners can be plugged in as farming and irrigation equipment, and they can also be used by non-farming activities managed by the neighboring buildings. For instance, next to the daycare center, the Conditioner and pathways form a maze, within which the kids can play miniature golf. Next to the church, the booster pump for the reservoir can also function as a baptistery. In this way, the Conditioner builds the important overlap between food production and other businesses and services, so that farming is not only geographically in the city, but also programmatically part of people’s everyday life.
As the scope of the project grows larger, the project further concerns the distance between the highway and the neighborhood. In the project’s master plan, vehicle routes and pedestrian paths are systematically meshed to produce both the conditions of separation and the conditions of intersection, allowing different lifestyles to bypass, converge, and communicate. It was difficult to find a plan that could anticipate smooth transitions between the fast and the slow. Ultimately, what I attempted to envision is a kind of space next to the highway where different lifestyles can exist distinctively as well as collectively.
As there are plenty of vacant lots along the I-610 Loop, similar interventions can be applied throughout the highway serving different parts of the city. Like McDonald’s, the basic ingredients (the Architectural Conditioner) are mass produced and shipped to many roadside locations, but unlike McDonald’s, the spatial and programmatic results do not follow one rigid formula. Each location and its constituents give the site its distinct flavors, with its own food choices, spatial arrangements, and events. Automobile culture and people’s necessity to eat are the only constant factors in this system; local activities that intersect with the highway make eating and driving different in each place.
This new way of imagining food, highway, and the city puts great emphasis on the social diversity of the city’s everyday life. Urban experiences should not only concentrate in the downtown or pedestrian-only zones; they could in fact go along with driving. Social relations, events, spaces, and business landscapes can be more fluid than they currently are. The design’s policy implication is that 1) greater public-private partnership is imperative and 2) investments of this kind need careful phasing. This endeavor by its nature involves multiple government agencies as well as a number of private stakeholders. The City’s Transportation Department should make the first move and build the ramps and secondary roads that connect the highway to the neighborhood; at the same time the Parks Department can begin transforming empty lots into farmlands. Neighboring businesses should be incentivized to co-manage the farmlands and keep their revenue – this can reduce the government’s burden of maintaining capital assets. Architectural Conditioners are needed as farming equipment, which should be subsidized by the Small Business Department or the city agency in charge of economic development, because these customizable Conditioners are designed to also attract food and produce vendors, ultimately contributing to grow business opportunities on the side. As populations from both the highway and the neighborhood congregate on the site to eat, the demand for other services increase and the neighboring businesses, who have been managing the farms, can now decide to invest in capital expansions of their own establishments. Their new buildings will further anchor the life and development of the site. Via careful allocation of responsibility and strategic phasing of investments, this model will generate rewards for both the public and the private sectors. The private entities gain by getting access to the commuter market – this benefit is especially precious for small vendors. The government gains as the redevelopment of these vacant lots along the highway can create jobs (both during and after the construction), address urban blight, and increase the city’s tax base.
As you can probably tell. I had immense fun with my thesis. The process of researching and designing this project was a strange mashup of hyperrealism and light-hearted fantasy. It was ambitious, as this was my first attempt to imagine an alternative method of city making based on a single behavioral quirk that I observed in the American society. It was also traditionalistic in a way, as I did not believe in the radical erasures of existing societal patterns: although I initially saw a problem in car culture, I chose not to reject it, but to embrace it and make driving always part of my recommendations. The final presentations received unanimous accolades from critics, although I am always aware that the project’s deviation from building design and its stylistic choice, among many other shortcomings, can disappoint certain audiences (the Architectural Conditioner could have been a lot prettier). The background research was mainly based on literature review and personal observations, not tested against empirical evidence as rigorously as I now wish it were. Yet I am very happy that this project made me realize the possibility and the limit of architecture. When I went down to Houston and studied how people eat and live in their city, I felt excited, hopeful, curious, and ultimately in awe of the complexity of urban experience. After all, something can be designed while some others cannot be, and my undergraduate thesis made me understand that there is something I can do and there are other things I have neither the capacity nor the will to do.
The entire thesis book can be downloaded from Syracuse University’s online archive. The full-size final presentation boards can be viewed by clicking on the image below.
Recommended Citation:
Luo, Yuxiang. 2014. American Picnickers. Syracuse University, BArch Thesis.