Learning from Lampasas   

If the highway ever dominates the town as the car is king, can the town adapt by creating architecture at the scale of and which facilitates and provides endless access to the car? Could we take the car-centric town to its logical end beyond the infrastructure? Can this seemingly regressive or conservative architectural intervention actually show the dead end that is a car-centric culture?



The intervention uses Lampasas, a small town an hour-and-a-half outside Austin, as a model for micropolitan America. The town is encircled with a new highway loop for infinite driving pleasure, and four new typologies emerge giving even greater access and glorification to the personal car: the new strip mall, the parking lot/tailgate town square, the drive-in church, and the drive-in home.




Following the legacies of No-Stop City and Learning from Las Vegas, the new strip mall images an endless system of canopies which merge sign and shed (in a digital, phone-GPS era) and glass “rooms” therein - motels, coworking, and retail.



The new house grows in order to make the car be central to everyday life, a piece of furniture within the living spaces.


The town square is extended into a massive, undulating parking lot for tailgating. Christmas string lights are reminiscent of the previous means of decorating the old square year-round.