Post-Normative Suburbia: A Codex for Levittown
This project is a visual polemic that posits alternative forms of living in a Suburban world made strange. We deploy techniques inspired by surrealist juxtaposition and reframing to create an alternative archival “codex” that critiques the normative conditions of Suburbia as typified in Levittown, New York. We project a strange alternative to the existing Levittown norm that allows for differences to be expressed amongst suburban dwellers, heightening individual freedom and collective equity. By both inverting and subverting the banal, globalized objects of materialist desire, we aim to advance a post-capitalist imaginary that can potentiate a freer and more equitable suburban existence.
Global consumerism strips architecture of its local specificity and uniqueness, investing everywhere with a uniform sense of nowhere. This condition reaches its apotheosis in contemporary Suburbia. From the inception of the Levittown model in the 1950’s, the single family suburban home was created as a commodity to be endlessly reproduced. Instead of producing a perfect world of consumerist satisfaction, the suburban “dream house” model inevitably negated the very image of domestic bliss it sought to promote by reinforcing repressive gender roles, heteronormative family structures, and racial biases. This project surrealistically utilizes the relics of capitalist development of single family homes and globally branded commercial sellers.
Challenging Levittown’s retroactive suburban methods, new global objects and urban interventions juxtapose and recombine programs and objects to promote collective scenarios as experiences that break the individualistic dreamland. We are imagining a world made strange through banal objects, questioning what is established as normal through commodified consumption and aesthetic covenants. Suburban practices and capitalist economy create absurd juxtapositions at urban and architectural scales that have become normalized. A catholic church sharing a wall with Carpet Depot for example. Relationships between pastoral dreamscapes, fences, department stores, sidewalks, churches, and single family homes create programmatic and organizational combinations that test new surreal architectural thresholds. Our proposal allows for individuals to excavate their personal pasts and desires to locate their own topological landscape in imaginative collectives.
Pratt Institute | Degree Project
Critics: Adam Elstein, Michele Gorman and Jeffrey Hogrefe
Partner: Susana Chinchilla
Site: Levittown, New York
*Received Top Honors by Pratt Institute School of Architecture.
*Published in Trans-Journal Magazine’s July 2020 Volume