luis fernando munoz work
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New Grounds

new grounds

a post-oil vision for port arthur, texas

princeton school of architecture thesis

advised by jesse reiser

Oblique View of Port Arthur, Texas in the year 2100

Section through atmosphere, New ground, and geological strata.

Zoom in of Section through strata and new ground

U.S GEMS, Founded in 2026, after the passing of the GND

Port Arthur, Texas

Port Arthur, Texas

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Aggregation Models–Structural Logic, Material economy, Structural economy

 
 

Roof Plan of a neighborhood

Single Unit Plan

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Section Through Coastline/ Water Remediation

Initial Collage

 
 
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Megastructures have historically sought to further densify already metropolitan areas, and failed to propose a way to sustain social and economic mobility. Rather than relying on bigness as a means of urban densification, the megastructure becomes a means of suburban remediation. This thesis offers an alternative to current ideas of zoning and challenges past ideas of the generic “technocratic” human through the design of megastructures that are to serve as a network for working, living, and playing built upon the infrastructure of the mineral extraction industry, and the town that emerged as a result. This reclaims the territory, protects against natural disaster, and provide new spaces of production and leisure. The thesis also poses the question of style, with many. megastructures of the past relying on industrial aesthetics, these megastructures push against the hegemony of past proposals and of the current built environment. designing for varying, but specific audiences. This new scale is to be the testing ground of how architecture can contribute in creating new models of post-human sustainability that will create new environments that allow for the introduction of different non native species, using both animal and human labor, localized agriculture, and facilitating the sustained cohabitation of human and nonhuman life.

Selected Reference Texts:

Banham, Reyner. Megastructure: Urban Futures of the Recent Past. New York: Monacelli Press, 1975.

Rudofsky, Bernard. The Prodigious Builders: Notes Towards a Natural History of Architecture. New York and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977.

Marx, Leo. The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1964.

Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition (1958), chapters “The Human Condition” and “The Public and the Private Realm”

Uexküll Jakob von. A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans: with a Theory of Meaning. Minneapolis: Univ. Press, 2010.

Hayden, Dolores. Seven American Utopias: Landscapes, Dwellings, and Towns, 1790-1940. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1976.

Nixon, Rob. “The Anthropocene: The Promise and Pitfalls of an Epochal Idea,” at Edge Effects

http://edgeeffects.net/anthropocene-promise-and-pitfalls (2014)

Megastructure Marketing

Experience within the inflatable megastructure