DECALCIFYING THE CITY Student: Misa Grannis Thesis Group: Latent Politics Instructor: Brian Price 4.01.

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Abstract
The city, with its fixed roots and rigid faades, became calcified long ago. As advances in personal and mobile technology enable faster and more flexible patterns of living and consumption, the disconnect between buildings and their inhabitants has become more and more apparent. The result is wasted material and financial investments, neighborhood stagnation and a shift of vitality from the interiors of buildings to the streets, sidewalks and open spaces of the city. It would be wasteful, however, to abandon the significant embedded value that exists in the current structures. Instead it becomes necessary to identify a third layer of reciprocal development--one that can mediate between the rigid yet valuable buildings and the fast-paced world that moves through them. The shortcomings of permanence in an era of rapid change were apparent long before the advent of global information networks or mobile technology, as seen for example in the work of Archigram and Buckminster Fuller. They recognized the need for architecture to be able to rapidly adapt to changes in demand or use patterns, as well as the potential for temporary interventions to act as catalysts for future growth and renewal. However, many of these projects did not anticipate the growing importance of atomization and the micro-scale. Three exemplary cases of successful rapid and impermanent city development at the micro-scale food trucks, parklets and pop-upsdemonstrate the economic potential of these typologies as well as their ability to produce new social ecosystems. However, not only are these solutions nonarchitectural, they are insufficient in their ability to transcend the scale of the individual unit. This thesis proposes to reconcile the slowness of the fixed city with the speed of urban life through a reinterpretation of the territory between the buildings and the street--already a heavily contested space coveted by private and public entities alike--as a thickened, occupiable zone for a new form of rapid urbanism. It attempts to create new ecologies of public street life by actively questioning the limited definitions of facade-sidewalk-street edge and exploiting the unique opportunities that result. As a notoriously troubled neighborhood with high vacancy rates and a history of revitalization efforts, San Franciscos Mid-Market district provides a challenging and relevant site in which to play out the possibilities of this proposal. These ideas are tested through an exploration of expandable spacemaking. The pairing of a flexible band with specific program plug-ins generates an open yet constrained system. The bands flexible, accordion-like armature creates a continuity of dimensionally-interdependent spaces while the plugins provide specificity and structural support. The bands construction limits the number of plug-ins that can be installed, turning the system into a public open-space generator. A platform for bottomup development and virtuous feedback loops is created by leasing these modules out to property owners, communities and business owners. Architects are no longer engaged in the creation of the urban experience. We must reconsider our role in the evolving city and be willing to question the meaning of architectural development in an era of rapid change.