In this project, my partner, Mady Gulon, and I took on the culturally charged and currently desolate Lake Street + Minnehaha Ave. intersection in Minneapolis. Target’s parking lot is one of the largest in the city, acres of vacant pavement that gives only snow storage and polluted runoff to its surrounding community. This Target sits directly across the street from the Minneapolis 3rd Police Precinct; the site of social uprising and perpetual scars following the murder of George Floyd in the summer of 2020. Much of our 15 acre site still bears the memory of that summer though much rebuilding has occurred. Our goal was to reimagine this vast parking lot - creating a catalyst for positive revitalization and engagement with a forgotten land- scape that was once all around us.

We went through a unique sequence of merging wire- frame drawings of the “soul” of our last studio project with 2D transcriptions of local news reports to create the architectural base of our intervention. This method, courtesy of Antonio, as a source of resistance over the semester. As we identified necessary programs for the site, we had to shape them according to the architectural base that our “souls” and transcriptions had created. Physical modeling was a key design activity throughout the semester - a welcomed exercise for the first semester back from the online instruction of the pandemic.

While molding the programs, we took it upon our- selves to create architecture as a system, a machine, which could give back to the community more than it takes. Through designing the pathways of water and food, the intervention takes and creates from what would otherwise be polluted or lost.