| dc.description.abstract | Edge-world. The horizon of our lived reality, this material world within which we all exist, is one composed of edges and defined by them, an edge-world.
To consider the nature of a town, of a city, of any conceivable environmental context is to consider a network of edges and their inherent relationships. Defined by edges is any geometric shape conceivable, any figure and any form, all that is natural and all that is built. The crown of a mountain peek stands in contrast against the backdrop of the sky only due to its outermost edges by which it is bound. City blocks and urban communities, too, are granted definition by systems of streets, gridworks of edges. Rivers, highways, treetops, and skyscrapers may be understood in terms of edges.
The American city of Chicago, Illinois is a profoundly enunciated embodiment of these edge-world characteristics. Although many of Chicago’s edges are benign in nature, those that define gang boundaries are the ones with which this thesis devotes its primary attention. Abruptly and effectively, these edges render the city a fragmentized entanglement of urban elements. The introduction of a 52,000 square foot school along one such urban edge seeks to enable new encounters in hopeful anticipation of a continued edge reconstruction throughout Chicago’s urban edge-scape. | en_US |
