Tropic of Charlie

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- Christopher Alexander

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Orthopolis


Orthopolis Final Image

“Roads? Where we’re going, we don’t need roads.”  -Dr. Emmett Brown in Back to the Future  



Thesis Students | Charles (Charlie) Allen and Siu Lun (John) Chan

Course | Graduate Thesis SCI-Arc  2022

Faculty Advisor | Soomeen Hahm

History & Theory Advisor | Marcelyn Gow

Research Advisors | William Virgil & Devyn Weiser

Special Thanks | Autumn Allen, Clarissa Chau, Chek Lam (Daniel) Lau,  Zamen Lin, Holland Seropian and Tiffany Yuen




        Call it an architecture cliché, or an architectonic nightmare, or even a Zombie flick where CIAM modernists have risen to eat the grey matter of today’s Jane Jacobites. Freeways won, before they lost; and before that, trains carved huge railyards into an occupied urban fabric.  And perhaps, had there not been a marriage of convenience between flight and field, we’d have leveled our cities to taxi planes through Time Square in our frenzied obsession with the future and its flying cars.  Streets are canonical, untouchable, and invaluable, until they aren’t.

    Our project speculates into a future where the street is no longer beholden to either human driven or privately owned and parked cars. Further, our right to air is viewed with a higher regard as the city breathes, and the world seeks to sequester CO2. With the anticipation of new vehicles and new spatial politics, comes an obfuscation of the line between building, dwelling, car, and street as they begin to coalesce into a single organism. Independently intelligent, and collective in their aggregation they hinge neither on single author nor design firm, but on the citizens, themselves serving as sensors.

    Our aim is to conceive an intervention that will free us from the arrested development inherent in contemporary design projects today, where a decade often separates completed project from the data on which its based. Instead, we propose a leveraging of modularity and mass production to decentralize design and aggregate an ever-evolving urban organism.

    After plundering the sordid canon of urbanism we plucked one prescient word from our furiously crumbled copies of Situationist literature that highlight architecture’s, and certainly our intervention’s, raison d’etre: possibility. Whether it is outrunning sea-level rise, drought, fire, storms, technological shifts, geo-politics, viruses, or any number of dangers and sources of violence, we must cling to and hold to the grander idea that our cities can and must move, drift, and drift with us.



Othopolis Video Teaser


Orthopolis Physical Pin-Up Night Before
Orthopolis Physical Presentation