Project Narrative
Introduction

The economic structure shaping the contemporary architectural profession has shifted toward a profit-centric paradigm, prioritizing market-driven development over affordability and livability. In an era where affordable housing is recognized as a fundamental human right, the persistent rise in homelessness highlights systemic inequities. This project seeks to intervene by proposing a strategic framework for repurposing underutilized urban spaces, such as abandoned warehouses, into affordable and equitable housing solutions. By engaging communities in the design process and enabling them to create self-determined models of informal settlements, this initiative not only addresses immediate housing needs but also fosters agency, resilience, and long-term social equity within marginalized urban populations. At the same time, an abandoned church becomes a center for the arts and the roots for a dwindling art community to regenerate. The two sites are connected by abandoned buildings and vacant lots that dot Penn Avenue. Today, these sites are no longer accessible to the public, reflecting a deterioration of local community space in Pittsburgh and an increase in commercialization across the city. We aim to make these increasingly privatized spaces in Pittsburgh accessible to regenerate communities and allow local cultures and practices to exist and flourish. Henri Lefebvre coined the term “right to the city,” emphasizing a transformative approach to urban life that prioritizes the everyday use value of spaces over their exchange or market value.  At the core of his argument is the belief that cities should serve the needs of their inhabitants rather than be driven by capitalist commodification. In this project, the artist community engages in subtle, yet powerful, interventions to reignite this approach, introducing non-commodifiable values into the neighborhood. Through art as a form of resistance and a way of life, these interventions challenge dominant economic paradigms and foster a collective reclaiming of urban space for the people, inspiring a suppressed art community in Pittsburgh to take over public spaces and engage the entire city in an exchange of ideas and experiences.

​This project challenges the inequities of the built environment by repurposing abandoned spaces, not only to shelter those in need but also to reclaim public space as a site of individual agency and collective action. The roof of this building becomes an active symbol of resistance, where people can construct temporary dwellings, engage in art, and form a collective community identity. The intervention is rooted in the idea that housing is a fundamental right and a political statement.

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​The rooftop settlement and warehouse will now host art installations, gatherings, and performances that activate the area and provide a platform for marginalized voices. These creative expressions allow residents and visitors to connect with the larger struggle for social justice, empowering them to reshape their surroundings. Across the city, similar interventions will materialize in other vacant and abandoned spaces, encouraging users to craft temporary art structures that later serve community needs—whether through collective gardens, pop-up services, or educational programs. These interventions across Penn Avenue will foster a culture of collaboration and self-sufficiency, turning forgotten spaces into thriving ecosystems of mutual aid. The intervention that encompasses the abandoned church challenges the art culture in a community where it has been historically repressed due to gentrification. Against the atomization of modern society, this initiative becomes an active hub that conjures new ways of community building, fostering collective engagement and reimagining urban spaces as shared environments where social bonds are strengthened and communal resilience thrives.

​In all of these projects, scaffolding acts as the connective tissue linking the infrastructure of the interventions and materializing the space necessary for individuals to be able to project their own ideas. The interventions aim to challenge the traditional notion of architecture that views buildings as static objects placed into areas without considering how they interact with their surrounding conditions. Instead seeking to repair social fractures by enacting change by forcing the larger network of the city grid to be hacked and manipulated to allow for spores of social reparations to infect the city grid and resolve fundamental issues of disconnect and disillusion in modern cities.

​Scaffolding acts as the universal language linking together the foundation of the project. Typically seen as an unwanted appendage of infrastructure latching onto existing buildings it now becomes a moving and ephemeral framework that invites the public into the design process. The scaffold allows stakeholders to impose their own desires onto physical structures to claim and create spaces that influence the social fabric. The role of the architect shifts from that of an authoritative creator to a facilitator who establishes the infrastructure and a growth model, enabling a dynamic, evolving process driven by the community itself. The interventions begin looking at architecture as something beyond a physical artifact and instead, as a dynamic intervention in which individuals can have the power to define and form a community through their actions.