A Parallel Walden

Abstract

Twenty-five years after Koolhaas characterized Walden as a “parallel junkspace”—and 172 years since Thoreau’s sojourn into its woods— the Pond is brought into the present, by way of a new DMV. Though Koolhaas and Thoreau’s conclusions seem diametrically opposed, their cosmologies, cited from everyday encounters, are much alike. Walden is the speculum they share: for Koolhaas, reflecting the junked-up virtual at high speed; for Thoreau, the hyperlocal, slow, and transcendent. Walden’s exceptional status has become its own existential liability: perfectly cast in amber under conservation-minded pretenses, the little pond has been denatured of the politics that so charged either text. Like an amble with a huckleberry party, going to the DMV should be a routine respite; an anomaly in one’s workaday schedule. The DMV, after all, is where we await the formation of our IDs, where our very means of navigating the world are tested. Why should it stay the punchline for all of society’s bureaucratic ills? Could a building that sees a full cross-section of society, every day, not stoke optimism between a civically-minded person, her peers, and her state? This thesis reimagines the civic building for the 21st-century as a horizontal datum that mixes function with pleasure: call it Civic+. A constellation of landscape pierces universal space, remaking some of what is air, solid. Spaces of waiting and of being-in-motion are formalized through receptacles and paths for man and car. Afloat in the tonic of wildness, the DMV expands the woods from an extended backyard for elite suburbia, to a public utility for all Massachusetts residents. In the driver’s seat, from hasty, rearward glances, we might find in the civic mundane, the sublime.