Marketplace Multiculturalism

Abstract

Picture Texas. No longer simply cowboys, footballs, and firearms, this land today is sustained by a daily choreography of cross-border commerce, managed by entertainment media turned handheld surveillance, and peppered with enclaves of immigrants from the world over. A contact zone where logistical and legislative apparati warp to serve consumer comfort, Texas today is the world tomorrow: forget the Alamo, it’s highways, tax-incentives, and backyard barbecue on the 21st century frontier. This thesis responds to a call for roadside service stations along a planned international tourist corridor in the Texas-Mexico borderlands with six interventions: a panoramic viewing tower disguised as a billboard, a sunken stadium for athletic agonism, a photovoltaic drive-in charging cinema, an international culinary incubator, a showroom for automated fulfilment, and a customs and border patrol welcome center. These structures are testing grounds for modes of relation and value exchange that edge beyond the outdated positivisms of globalization. They ask how architecture might produce new possibilities and publics by working within and taking advantage of contemporary systems of control. As tourist destinations, the stops suggest the nation’s true mythos lies not in static symbols but in choreographies of transaction and contact. Articulating in built form the dynamic processes that define a territory of sprawl, this proposal suggests that Texas’s most authentic monuments are the stops we make along the way.