Cutting Grounds

Project Team:
El Hadi Jazairy + Rania Ghosn
Aaron Weller, Rachel Jessup

The westward expansion of the frontier in the nineteenth century and the commercialization of lithography widely popularized bird eye views of American cities, only to be subsequently overshadowed by property data and topographic measurements with the rise of the expert figure of the surveyor. The research reclaims the inscription of grounds as a generative act simultaneously embodied in the practices of geography and etching. We being by developing a set of architectural archetypes in low-density American cities and subsequently deploy them to recombine, modify, or deny those types, thereby creating new urban scenarios.