Fringe Benefits: Accessories for a Bulldoze City

Abstract

Urban sprawl is the result of giving cars priority over people in the design of our cities. Designing buildings for the automobile as the audience results in larger, faster registrations of architecture, removing human-scaled subtleties from the built environment. The parking garage is the poster child for car-oriented architecture, plaguing cities like Houston, TX, and encouraging more sprawl. While the parking garage trend might be drab, trends at the human scale offer something far more enticing. Pop media and fashion trends revolving around Houston are colorful, sparkly, and anything but drab. As businesses continue to implement flexible work-from-home policies and Houston works to incentivize alternative forms of transportation, the need for parking garages at city centers will likely dwindle, opening new post-era occupancy possibilities for these infrastructural buildings. How can the vibrant sensibilities found in contemporary southern fashion trends help inform the reclamation of parking structures for public engagement? Acknowledging the amount of embodied carbon associated with these massive concrete infrastructures, this thesis calls for a solution rooted in incremental reclamation, rather than demolition, of these buildings. Appropriating the function of the fashion accessory as a timeful strategy for refreshing basic apparel, this thesis utilizes accessorizing as a lens for transforming “basic” underutilized parking garages at city centers from dull monuments for stacking cars into vibrant spaces for connecting people. Through playful materiality, speculative facades, and an expanded narrative on the architectural accessory, this thesis contemplates the benefits of fringe for a bulldoze city.