Common Ground

Abstract

Acknowledging the social, political, and cultural implications rooted in the historical relationship between land, architecture, and urbanism, Common Ground expands upon these relationships in order to accommodate the pressing subjects of urban and environmental discourses. Exploring these historical relationships today requires us to rethink the rhetoric of sustainability. The thesis envisions a flexible urban framework situated on Treasure Island, San Francisco that tests the potential of augmenting coastal cities — buttressing their social, cultural, and environmental ecology — against the immediate influences of climate change. Explored is an alternative to cities’ propensity to obfuscate the effects of sea level rise, and to instead develop a speculative urbanism where environment, urbanism, and infrastructure are interdependent and intertwined. The thesis is manifest as a temporary community for first world climate refugees that poses the city as contingent, transitional, and evolving in order to accommodate more robust measures for combating the effects of climate change. >