Philippe Kame
I am subletting a room this summer in a 12 bedrooms duplex located on White street in Ann Arbor. The two houses are connected by a shared porch and are both two storeys high. My room is located on the second floor at the end of stairs. The outline of the room is a rectangle that provides a generous amount of space (about 220 square feet). The room came furnished with the current owners belongings which provides an insight into his personality.
Every wall in the room host decor items from the current owner (photographs, flags, posters, paintings, plants, just to name a few), that appear to have been collected over the years. This elevation view provides a glimpse into this curation that again speaks to the owner’s personality and taste.
This map shows how one individual can circulate around the bedroom. The bed itself bisects the room creating different accessible regions. These regions are, however, limited by the presence of furniture as the gray zones demonstrates. The biggest limitation is created by a partial slant in the ceiling in the upper right corner of the room that reduces ceiling height in that region, making it inaccessible for someone 6’2” tall.
The above Actor-Network map seeks to understand how students at the University of Michigan rent around the city of Ann Arbor. By using the house in which I live, one of the many community houses organized around varsity sports teams in the neighborhood, as a point of inquiry, I map out the factors that forces student into off-campus housing at the university. The map demonstrates how the rising student population at U of M without a consequetial increased in the capacity of university provided housing leads to a shortage of beds that in turn forces students into off-campus housing. Demand exceeds supply throughout the city as a result that encourages rental companies to increase rent in order to maximize profit. Without legislative intervention, the cost to rent in the city grows liberally which explains the current housing crises Ann Arbor experiences.
Thisw figure ground map shows the location of Cira Center in relation to the train station, parking structures, the river, and the expansive railway lines that converge to the station.
This aerial view shows the details surrounding Cira Center at its locationn next to 30th Street Station. An expansive as well as complex system and network of railway lines and highways exist around and below the skycraper.
The oblique drawing of Cira Center allows us to better perceive how the skycraper exists in relation to the other structures surrounding it. The skycraper is 29 storey high, a high that allows the scale of Cira Center to exist harmoniously among 30th Street Station to its right and Amtrak’s 1525 acres multistory passenger parking garage to its left.
The above ANT map demonstrates the different forces and actors that have influenced the development of Cira Center. The map also explains how the Development of Cira Center has accelerated the urban development of West Philadelphia leading to the ambitious Schuykill Yards project. Furthermore, the map also seeks to understand how such developments consequentially also accelerate gentrification in West Phidelphia leading the city into an inescapable housing crisis.