Deliberate Shopping and the Microcosmic Department Store

Architecture Thesis Project

Thesis Advisors: Mack Scogin + Erika Naginski

Architecture has always been implicated in the reciprocal relationship between an individual and their larger social/cultural/economic context. As an urban intervention, it can redefine our prevailing conception of the individual in society as well as the fabric of that society itself. This thesis takes a specific look at the individual through American history as a way to critique the commercialization of identity, supplanting it instead with a sense of education for a more affirmative effect on culture and society. We recognize both that an individual is constituted by the differences that emerge from his/her integration and that architecture can emphasize the latent possibilities for the individual within the city.

We can see the individual in solitude translated architecturally in two specific American products: the ranch house and the suburban ranch-style home. The frontier ranch house of the 19th century, through its cellular structure emphasized personal privacy and constituted an architecture of spatial claim. In the 1950’s, the idealization of the frontier and its lone figure reached even further into the American consciousness and was translated into the suburban ranch-style house in an effort to recall a specifically American style, both sanitized and standardized, with all its connotations of personal freedom, social ascendency through ownership, and even pastoralism.