As of 2020, the UN has identified a record 71 million refugees—a group comprising of people who are forcibly displaced from their homes and cannot return. Millions more are claiming asylum, and none of these numbers account for a future surge of climate refugees. Meanwhile, the US is facing the reality of a temporal economy that is struggling to transition from manufacturing to a technology and information-based economy.
The Territorial Exchange is situated as a response to a world in which traditional architectural morphologies cannot keep up with the accelerating forces of human migration and automation, providing a system that simultaneously facilitates the movement of people and goods, and acting as an interface for migrant and local populations to work together. Parallel to its mission of integrating diverse populations, the block has metamorphosized from a collection of separate buildings into a single network, comprising a set of fluid ‘territories’ that are customized in-situ. By providing an ever-changing common ground for a mixed population, The Territorial Exchange seeks to rewrite the narratives of one-sided immigrant assimilation and cycles of obsolescence.
In 1889, the activist Jane Addams founded a revolutionary settlement house called Hull House. Based in Chicago, Hull House was a secular charitable organization that helped immigrants adjust to their new lives. Hull House preached cooperation and advocated for reciprocal relationships between different groups of people; just as locals could teach immigrants, immigrants could teach locals. The program changed frequently based on the needs and desires of the people it served, and it adapted to the times.
As a testing ground, Erie, Pennsylvania represents the extremes of both issues of automation and human migration. Over the course of the last century, this Rust Belt city has been slowly losing factory jobs to automation and to more competitive labor markets. Erie was also selected as a resettlement city for refugees, in no small part due to its low cost of living—a direct consequence of its economic woes. The collision of these two forces has produced a surprisingly positive result: residents of Erie say that refugees have created over 100 new businesses and that xenophobia is uncommon.
The existing site is a full block in Downtown Erie with a variety of building types and uses, integrated into the fabric of the city and adjacent to many neighborhood services.
The arrangement of space is based on the concept of John Hejduk’s Nine Square Grid, a 1950s design prompt in architectural education that encouraged the iteration of a kit-of-parts composition within a grid. This exercise was a planimetric rearrangement of the composition of SANAA’s Museum of the 21st Century, exploring different configurations of figural objects on a grid.
The Territorial Exchange will divide the site into an invisible field of territories running through the buildings, establishing occupiable spaces that are populated with figural objects. The grid becomes an enfilade of non-hierarchical spaces, reducing the social separation between different populations.
The program will consist of a shared living institution, a vocational school with training for digital tools, a digital fabrication facility, and a recycling center, among other uses. The combination of adjacent institutions will encourage entrepreneurship; fully trained migrants and locals will rent the equipment in the digital fabrication facility to produce goods for their own startup enterprises, aided by microloans. This model will allow for self-sufficiency without the typical financial or physical prerequisites.
Parallel to its mission of integrating diverse populations, the block has metamorphosized separate sites into a single network, comprising a set of fluid ‘territories’ that are customized in-situ. It utilizes an automated conveyance system and a kit-of-parts of prefabricated modules that can shift and morph within these discrete territories. The architecture establishes a formal framework of structure and enclosure within which products, manufactured on site, can slide into place. As a result, the architecture can better adapt to changing technologies and population patterns. It also allows people of different ages, genders, and cultures to participate in the creation of their dwellings without heavy manual labor, and it functions like a small-scale version of Plug-In City with a more environmentally sustainable materials economy.
Adaptive re-use is utilized in tandem with new construction in order to make the best use out of the available building stock, while also accommodating future growth. Structural columns are dropped into the cores of existing buildings, supporting suspended volumes above.
The circulation is pushed to the inside of the block, using common access points for multiple buildings and encouraging programmatic and spatial interconnectedness. The automated conveyance system intersects and adjoins with a network of paths for human movement throughout the block; the public moves from program to program with a complete awareness of the movement of goods across the site.
The system of module fabrication, distribution, occupancy, and recycling is a perpetual cycle, utilizing as little off-site material as possible in order to accommodate dramatic changes in use, brought on by changing population patterns and technologies.
Within the city, the Territorial Exchange takes on the presence of a social and economic hub, integrating with its context while also setting an example for a new typology that can better adapt to the times.
The productive functions of the block are always visible to passerby. In this view, pedestrians walk underneath the recycling facility, which converts melted-down prefabricated modules back into raw material.
Within Erie, The Territorial Exchange markets itself through its relentless transparency and obvious accessibility. In this view, the activities within the fabrication facility are on full display to motorists and pedestrians.
Similarly, within the block’s programs, one does not feel isolated from the city of Erie. A high level of transparency in the building envelope enforces an awareness of the different people and activities.
As a digitized take on the Encyclopedie architectural plates, the graphic style of this project is representative of elements of both past and future, combining the reality of an Industrial Revolution-age building stock with the promising future of digital fabrication.
As an analysis of the architecture must take place on separate scales for the building shell and for the plug-in modules, a series of three section-perspectives are annotated with vignettes that zoom in on specific moments. Each one focuses on a different 'axis' of the project: social, economic, and cultural.
These vignettes are presented as a catalog, isolating the plug-in modules from their context, which can change, but populated with diverse entourage, characteristic of the proposal’s mission of institutionalized cultural exchange. The entourage are pulled from paintings from the countries that represent the populations cohabitating in Erie, including places like Myanmar, Iraq, the Congo, and the US. The figures are made monochromatic, each individual emitting light onto the spaces and changing its character. Within the Territorial Exchange, architecture must be assimilated, not necessarily people.
The vignette images are presented as both a catalog and a story. The narrative, which constitutes a series of quotes stitched together from relevant literature, sets the tone for the human experience of using these spaces, while the metanarrative is the sales pitch—the fact that these fragments of space are dynamic and are being bought and sold in a market.
The Territorial Exchange capitalizes on programmatic adjacencies by establishing visual connections between complementary programs. Here, a prefabricated stair functioning as a vocational school classroom is oriented toward a skylight looking into the fabrication facility. And the buildings have a link via automated conveyance system too. Students can summon prefabricated parts from the fabrication facility straight into the classroom.
In this view, a prefabricated part is moving from the fabrication facility into the classroom, while people watch from below. The relationship between the movement of people and the movement of goods is kept transparent throughout the project.
Another visual link between programs occurs where users of the community center can look down into the skylight of a theater and watch a production from above.
The theater, which is based off of the experimental productions of Jane Addams’ Hull House theater group, would let the audience mix with the performers. Instead of a single stage, the performers are everywhere, while people watch from rotating booths. The theater is retrofitted with an automated conveyance system that carries performers above the audience, using the same technology that would carry prefabricated products from building to building.
Furthermore, the Territorial Exchange seeks to strengthen the efficacy of the supply chain by blurring the spatial separation between creative labor and automated labor. Though the Territorial Exchange would take advantage of on-site fabrication, it would also integrate with the economy at-large, and the exchange of territories would continue to multiply.
In conclusion, the Territorial Exchange rejects the narratives of one-sided immigrant assimilation and cycles of obsolescence. It seeks to combine comprehensive social programs with an adaptive architectural typology in order to bridge cultural differences and institutionalize symbiosis.