Co-Adaptation 01

“New Jersey State Highway Dept.

That zero panorama seemed to contain ruins in reverse, that is – all the new construction that would eventually be built. This is the opposite of the ‘romantic ruin’ because the buildings don’t fall into ruin after they are built but rather rise into ruin before they are built. This anti-romantic mise-en-scene suggests the discredited idea of time and many other “out of date” things. But the suburbs exist without a rational past and without the “big events” of history. Oh, maybe there are a few statues, a legend, and a couple of curios, but no past – just what passes for a future. A Utopia minus a bottom, a place where machines are idle, and the sun has turned to glass, and a place where the Passaic Concrete Plant (253 River Drive) does a good business in STONE, BITUMINOUS, SAND, and CEMENT. Passaic seems full of “holes” compared to New York City, which seems tightly packed and solid, and those holes in a sense are the monumental vacancies that define, without trying, the memory traces of an abandoned set of futures.”


-Robert Smithson, Monuments of Passaic


The urban periphery is defined more by what it is not than by what it is.

The horizontal stratification of urban space into zones of singular purposes has forged pervasive intermediary tracts. Dubbed the ‘holey plane’[1], these zones facilitate control, separation and flexibility. Without inherent moral value, they are one outcome of processes whose effects also include a breakdown of public space, ecological destruction, banality, economic unfeasibility, and architectural homogeneity. Their role is to contain waste, hold matter, move through, and separate uses. Bodily inhabitation is often impossible, displeasurable, and sometimes dangerous.

Liminality is ripe for rethinking. What would it mean to revise ‘drosscape,’ not as “waste”, but as opportunity for dense inhabitation?[2] Can we envision a re-grafting of domestic, infrastructural and productive spaces into a symbiosis rather than a contravention? Rather than expanding outwards, can we expand inwards?


This pamphlet addresses these concerns by synthesizing competing organizational logics. It envisions altering the architectural design process, contractual apparatuses, tectonics, and urban planning. As a break from static contemporary construction contracts, the design schedule is re-thought to conceptualize the architecture project not as a product, but as a series of interrelated interventions that both operate on, and are informed by, the site and use. Novel tectonics are employed as the physical armature that engenders cynosural change.

The frontier is literally in our cities.