The Architecture of Dread

The project serves as an inventory of dread, exploring the tensions between a pre-existing reality and a fabricated perception.

It hinges on its narrative: a doomsday prepper in the Great Plains, fully and completely convinced he is living through an apocalypse that has not happened. In his mind, the world has reached a post-apocalyptic standstill. Everyday, he builds custom bikes and hunts for Texas Kangaroo Rats, convinced their lack of reliance on liquid water is the key to his survival. Everyday, life outside his bunker walls continues as we know it today, unphased by his constructed reality.

Research began with general surveys of the Texhoma population and anthropic history. It then pivoted to the Texas Kangaroo rat and their ability to live without water, conspiracy theories that have gained traction in the Great Plains Region, the psyche of preppers, and the anatomy of bunkers. Research on the prepper phenomenon informed the idea of perception as a catalyst.

Context / “the bank”:

The drawing bank can be understood in three parts:

I. a record of the land through the lens of the Texas Kangaroo Rat, documenting the flora that make up most of their diet. These plants and seeds are what the Kangaroo rats metabolize, extracting moisture from them in order to produce water internally.

II. a documentation of the non-human “actors” of the narrative, showing the Kangaroo Rats, their metabolic processes, and the bikes.

III. a continuation of the previous research, noting some techniques and systems that allow for off-grid living.

Context / “the maps”:

The context drawings respond to the research findings, highlighting a disparity in perception and reality. The first drawing maps out a system of transportation and movement across the Great Plains Region, tracking bird migration, existing railroad tracks, highway systems, kangaroo rat habitats, and flight paths. The second drawing distorts this same topic, reconsidering these systems through the lens of impending doom, the potential catastrophes and systemic collapse calling for a survival plan. While the drawings present these mappings as separate, they also serve as evidence for their connection and permeability. Perception is rooted in, and does not exist without, the so-called reality.

Context / “the cabinet”:

The context model operates in the same way as the drawings, this time archiving more evidence for a wide range of conspiracy theories. The everyday is archived in a cabinet: flood and drought maps, chem trails, cattle trails, cloud seeding, military bases and a nuclear testing plant. When paired with distrust, those same things translate into the conspiracies that drive dread – government control, alien mutilations, radioactive sites, hidden facilities. The cabinet is an inventory of causes for dread in the Great Plains. It is, however, paired with scientific equipment and kangaroo rats: another deployable survival plan.

Intervention / the architecture:

The architecture operates at three different scales:

I. Texhoma.
II. The bunker
III. The rats.

The architecture serves as a proxy of illusion at three different levels:

I. The visible.
II. The permeable.
III. The fully hidden.

Texhoma / the permeable:

At the layer of the city, the bunker is simply a room, and the deception in place is not only engineered by our actor, but acting against him. The actor must access designated nodes in order to search for kangaroo rats, but cannot rely on existing transportation, so he creates his own. The routes of his travels are when the veil between him and reality is at its most porous, so he fabricates routes that will best avoid reality. The devised masterplan of Texhoma aims to ensure that every major business, main road, and largely populated area, is avoided, keeping his perception of a post-apocalyptic Texhoma alive.

The Bunker’s built reality is driven by and reinforced by his paranoia. Out of fear of visitors, his house is devised through categories: what remains on view, what can be quickly hidden, and what is completely imperceptible to others.

Rat City / the visible:

A full blown rat city – a 10ft wide glass tube filled with kangaroo rats and a built environment for them – is always visible to dissuade further suspicion. By convincing unwelcome intruders that they have found the very strangeness they seek, the so-called “rat city” prevents them from further digging under the surface. The rats are the actor’s experiments, companions, hobby, and hope for survival.

The furniture / the permeable:

Every piece of furniture in his lab and workshop has been intricately designed to quickly hide, flip, and disguise the reality of his workspaces. They are versatile and modular, adaptable to both display and conceal his work as the situation demands it.

The bunker / the hidden:

Beyond the layer of camouflage created by the furniture, most of the operations of the bunker remain apparent: the wood and metal shop, an area for interacting with the rats, storage for maintaining rat city, living quarters, and a general laboratory area. The true inner workings of his laboratory, however, remain fully hidden from view. The bunker’s architecture facilitates the existence of this hidden room through walls that closely mimic what viewers would expect based on the experienced exterior. The discrepancy between the perception of the building experience and the actual experience is small enough for the unsuspecting visitor to disregard, and visitors are further disoriented by a forced procession around Rat City, decreasing their odds of ever noticing the disparity between the interior and exterior. The hidden room is then able to materialize in space that the visitor would assume to be non-existent, failing to notice the discrepancy between their perception and reality.

Final model / “the episode of encounter”:

The episode of encounter becomes a visualization of these factors at play with one another, combining the design of the secret room, the concealed entrance, and the modular furniture into a materialization of an architecture catalyzed by dread. The project explores proxies to deception through the bikes, the furniture, Rat City, and the bunker’s architecture. The bike paths and the bikes themselves preserve the actor’s manufactured reality. The bunker and its furniture preserve the viewer’s perception. Rat City inhabits the in-between, both assuaging the viewer’s perceived suspicions and occupying the actor’s fabricated post-apocalyptic reality. Together, these pieces contextualize dread as a driving force behind the cyclical tension and concurrence of perception and reality.

Washington University in St. Louis, ARCHITECTURAL DESIGN IV
OPTION STUDIO: CORRESPONDENCE
Coordinator: ZAHRA SAFAVERDI

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