America: The New Domestic Landscape
Collaboration with Zoe Kauder Nalebuff
Documentary Film
GSAPP Incubator Prize 2020
Work In Progress

America: The New Domestic Landscape is a research project about architecture’s role in propagating a climate of fear for a city and its inhabitants. We believe that architecture must prioritize affect as a framework for addressing health and climate. And that to do so requires historical understanding. Through archival material we consider architecture’s relationship to historical anxieties about the postindustrial metropolis, the disintegration of the social safety net, and the media infatuation with danger which all precipitate the present. Inspired by the legacy of experimental filmmaking in architecture, we test documentary film as an expanded mode of practice. This allows us to critically unpack archival footage in its native media, point to the affective power of film, and make visible how the built environment—just like cinema—is a project of power and control.