Residual Architecture
Residual spaces are not unknown in our cities. I am thinking of the open spaces under our highways and the buffer spaces around them. Instead of acknowledging and exploiting these characteristic kinds of space we make them into parking lots or feeble patches of grass-no-man's lands between the scale of the region and the locality.
Robert Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture
Lost Highway is about creating space for humans in a place where people would dread being; the nexus of a super highway system. Here, Houston's Interstates 45 and 69 reign supreme.
The interchange is residual architecture; what's left over when we build without people in mind. Strip malls, gas stations, and auto infrastructure betrayed the humans that built them to instead serve the machine.
Analysis through imagining / Imaging
To begin, impressions of the site were created using Photoshop. These describe a stark antianthropo world.
The project does not attempt to control or limit the negative aspects of the site. Instead it uses these aspects as generators for a new type of architecture. These imagined spacial sequences guide the design intent.
In Emergency Escape the viewer begins in an oppressive underground infrastructural space, but finds uplifting space within it.
In Opportunity the viewer is presented with an unlikely chance to explore the infrastructural site. Entering a pump station from an ajar manhole, the viewer discovers something unexpected.
In both sequences, what made the final space powerful was the contrast they set with the infrastructure that proceeded them. The spaces do not have to distance themselves from the building language of infrastructure to connect with humans. The projects goal is to create spaces in and of an infrastructural environment that still tap into human emotion.
Invading the machine space
In order to fully embrace the interchange the new site had to expand into it. First the voids of the highways are defined and then bisected with Houston's street grid. The new spaces that will embrace the intersection are shown in red. The residential program, shown in yellow, is inserted on the newly defined site. The whole is sunk below the surface in order to create a new layer of circulation that avoids the already clogged surface world.
A new Architecture
Spread across the interchange a new architecture takes shape. It uses the scale of the machine's world to create space that asserts our primacy.
The unfinished nature of infrastructure supports it purpose to serve machines but rejects human interaction in the same way that these imagined structure do.