This was a student project by Erin O'Rourke for Jane Amidon's LARCH 644 course, Spring 2007. This site focuses directly on the slope where instability is a major concern. How firmly can humans adapt to living on the slope? How firmly can housing grip to the slope and create living environments? Who or What is the infrastructure, and how does it bind together materials and grids at varying scales? Considering the shifting and colliding grids of urban and suburban contexts on the site, as well as the ambiguous nature of urban land soil, modeling and material studies were conducted to better understand how humans, vegetation, and shipping containers might act on the slope, and which material might prove to be the infrastructure. Through the act of deliberately creating friction on the site, an already existing layer of vegetation is pulled through and threads together the grids as well as the pieces (container housing and humans) being applied. A dynamic relationship between housing and vegetation evolves where the vegetation is the main agent guiding how humans and container housing act and re-act on the site. The purpose of using the shipping containers and the vegetation is to initiate and define a relationship for how housing and vegetation can both stitch together the slope and manage space with and around one another. The vegetation is the adapter and creates the greatest amount of performance and spread. There is not a set programmatic or spatial master plan as the location of the shipping containers is temporal and shifting by nature and design. The vegetation pushes and pulls the site at its discretion and in its natural habitat and asks,Aggressive and scenographic for whom? - Erin O'Rourke This work is a part of the online collections of the Knowlton School of Architecture Student Archives, The Ohio State University. It is part of an effort to make accessible student work ranging from the first student that graduated from the program in 1903 to the present. Keywords: student work, KSA,
