Philadelphia Grotesque

Don’t try to drive the homeless into places we find suitable. Help them survive in places they find suitable.”

— Daniel Quinn

Philadelphia Grotesque//

Exploring social & urban abandonment

The grotesque. It can provoke ideas of physical abnormalities, personality disorders, or dissociation from your environment, but to this project it is about point of view. Normal vs abnormal. Us, the regular vs them, the outlier. What’s the norm, what’s acceptable, and what isn’t?

Abandonment, both societal and architectural, can be seen as grotesque, abnormal in the eyes of our society. We consider it “the homeless problem” or “urban blight” and can provoke discomfort, uncertainty, and fear in some. We want to fix them, make them like us, but why? These abandoned spaces are still useful and the people are still human.

What if, instead re-assimilating them into the society that got them to their current position, we let them live their lives in their own communities. What if this forgotten architecture and these forgotten people were the basis of a new society. One that bends and breaks the social rules of our society and the traditional approaches to architecture. A society parallel to our own and the architecture that follows.