Get In-Line

There are currently 114 thousand miles of abandoned rail lines and buildings sprawling across the United States: displacing people, dividing the urban realm, and manifesting pockets of poverty. These urbanistic, social, cultural, and economic consequences stem from a top-down ideological perspective of a particular future. This paralyzes the urban realm with walls of underutilized infrastructure while maintaining their oppression over the inhabitants. We recognize these in-between zones of defunct abandonments, these rail lines, these walls, as forgotten and lost assets. These interstitial abandoned walls, wedged between lots, are the ideal instruments to address societal concerns such as workforce training, low-income housing, food accessibility, healthcare, community engagement, and much more. The beauty of these uninterrupted networks is their ability to distribute community amenities throughout the city with ample accessibility. Their varying topology and widths present a range of opportunities for distinct architectural interventions. Our project, Get In-Line, reverses a walls’ paradigm and redefines its spatial make-up by providing essential amenities along and through an axis that once displaced its context.

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Awards

- The Suzanne Kolarik Underwood Thesis Prize
- Norman D. Kurtz ‘58 Fund for Innovation in Engineering Education