The Lost Highway
Mark Campbell & Deane Simpson

This unit begins a three-year investigation into the architectural possibilities of land-, sea-, and air-based networks.
In 2009/10, we will study the Dwight D. Eisenhower National System of Interstate and Defense Highways (STRAHNET) in the United States.

A relic of Cold War logistics, the US Interstate system extends for 46,837 miles, supporting the majority of all commercial and vehicular traffic, and connecting all aspects of American life from the domestic to the transcontinental. Stretching across 48 states, the infrastructure of freeways and highways, tributaries and underpasses, lays America out 'flat', as Don Delillo once said, 'as birdshit on a Buick'.

The architectural implications of the Interstate are as pragmatic and manifest, as they are symbolically and mythically resonant. The unit will examine how the serpentine stretch of this system allows new architectural and urban typologies, such as the spontaneous communities of retiree RV enthusiasts, which spring up in the desert, or the Walmart distribution network, which re-routes trucks as they drive across the US according to fluctuating consumer demand and weather conditions. By critiquing such representational precedents as road maps and automobile manuals, together with such intellectual precepts as Venturi and Scott Brown’s ‘forgotten symbolism’ in Learning from Las Vegas (1972) and Koolhaas’s hypersymbolic in S,M,L,XL (1995) and Great Leap Forward (2002), we will examine how architects utilise — and distort — research during the design process.

As a unit based largely around 2D modes of representation, we will employ such graphic methods as drawing, mapping, photography, film and television advertising to explore the Interstate system and work toward defining a new type of research-based design studio. Following the collection of spurious research data, debatable information and seemingly irrelevant documents, students will reinterpret and design a ‘drive-thru’– a junction between the driver, the vehicle, and the Interstate, which offers a rich variety of exchanges and architectural possibilities. Typically located in anonymous and neglected locations, such as outside of city limits or the blank expenses of the desert, these facilities are not so much destinations or points of departure, as a pause along a neverending route.