Rethinking Suburbs PDF Download

The American Dream is grounded in home ownership, specifically the fantasy of owning a piece of land and building a house. The suburbs attest to this dream; they were built on abundance. The American Dream illustrates the relationship between Americans and their land. The abundant land became not just a physical attachment, but a daydreaming shelter for imagination. The American land becomes the shelter for such a dream, and the dream shaped American life and impacted how American cities, towns and suburbs were developed. However, the current suburban development, a direct product of the American Dream is losing its quality and meaning in the problematic relationship between humans and resources. It has caused suburban sprawl, land exploitation, inefficient energy and resource consumption. It shaped the American Landscape with a single language boldly and controversially. The dwelling units simply became objects ofsubdivision. Therefore the Suburbs that symbolized the American Dream now invade the American Landscape. Dwelling has simply lost its poetic aspect. This project explores American identity and strengthens the uniqueness of the American Dream through the idea of Poetic Urbanism in exurban situations, in order to provide an alternative vision for America's suburbs and, in the process, reframe the American Dream. The project poetically transforms the American suburb into a holistic ecological landscape - an integration of total landscape that creates an alternative urban plan for the suburbs. A poetic focus on sun and light, addresses design elements such as sun rise horizontal edges, temperature, zones, materiality, sun path, shadows, public and private land, and a solar energy plant, which is interpreted as public and sacred. The new systems work together transforming the land into shelter for daydreaming within the American dream. The poetic suburb is designed by finding rhythm in public spaces and private spacesr and organizing ownership within a public realm. Sun and light intervene in daily life and engage the suburb with a poetic and ecological holistic approache The new idea of the American Suburb is making poetry, and a set of poems of sun and dreams become connections among the intimacy of land, the American Dream, and the human being. The design methodology is a holistic approach that engages holistic landscape with a community that is self-sustained with energy flows as a whole ecological system through each part. The essential energy resource is sun. The design philosophy is to find and strengthen a relationship between human, dwelling, and sun, spiritually and ritually, creating a poetic narrative to shelter the American Dream and the daily life of human dwelling. This is the Poetic Urbanism.