ARCH 432 - FALL 2025
The Community Rehearsal Center
(Misfit as Method)
Demolition produces fragments. Photogrammetry reconstitutes matter. Assemblies assert autonomy. Collision produces consequence. The Community Rehearsal Center binds fragments into civic form.
On the former site of Cabrini-Green in Chicago, prolonged demolition has reorganized the ground. What remains are photographs, infrastructural traces, partial grids—the material evidence of collective life. These remnants are not cited; they are reconstructed.
Archival images of the demolished towers are processed through photogrammetry and 3D scanning into spatial propositions. Registration errors, distortions, and gaps are thickened into assemblies—autonomous systems with structural demands. The archive becomes mass.
These assemblies are non-negotiable.
Within a 25,000 square foot Community Rehearsal Center—combining performance, archive, storage, and education—the fragments do not integrate. They interfere. Volumes bend. Circulation detours. Joints remain exposed. Thresholds thicken.
Misfit is not aesthetic effect; it is disciplinary rigor.
Fragments absorbed become ornament. Collision without consequence becomes image. In a site shaped by demolition, architecture must carry the weight of its residue.