Architectural Voids: Computational Archiving of Infrastructural Expansion

The United States has always demonstrated a keen proficiency for wielding the instruments of the built environment as a means of demarcating spaces and building barriers to resources. Rehearsed language used to undergird pronouncements of independence in support of the original colonies with the dual intent of walling off those inalienable resources from the most vulnerable. The people rendered as "other". Individuals contrasted against the backdrop of settler colonial histories. Architectural Voids speaks to the contrast of communities constrained by infrastructure projects, and those thriving in its maintenance of economic, healthcare, and educational impediments actively in place. These are the vestiges of walled-off cities imposed onto neighborhoods of economic and racial segregation. This practice-led research applies computational tools to construct speculative composites, archiving the frenetic realities of architecture’s violence on once thriving communities, documenting adverse impacts these projects have had on urban geographies across America. Architectural voids makes visible the spectral presence and opaque nature of infrastructure's harms that remains operative.