The Decorated Shed in the Texas Triangle

Abstract

Within the Texas Triangle, a region defined by rapidly growing metropolitan areas, the relationship between architecture and the edge-city is emerging and being defined. Dating back to the 1930s, with the help of special interest groups lobbying for highway construction and Eisenhower’s Federal Highway Act of 1956, American urbanism dramatically shifted its trajectory advocating for private automobile ownership for each citizen. Due to the population’s dependency on the automobile, architecture began to establish itself as roadside advertisements or better known in architectural discourse as the decorated shed, a term coined in the book Learning from Las Vegas. The architectural discoveries discussed in Learning From Las Vegas are still prevalent in roadside architecture of the 21st century yet there are new topics for study that have since revealed themselves. A topic that has made itself most prevalent is the fact that the decorated shed has evolved with our society to use the digital interface as a new medium to establish and exploit itself. Similar to the introduction and thus dependence of the car to the American society, our dependence on the phone and internet is heavily affecting the way these so-called decorated sheds are presenting themselves to their environments. The question remains, how has and how will the decorated shed evolve to exploit the current urban context? In order to speculate the future of the decorated shed, a creative artifact is made in order to create a fictional conclusion that takes place at intersection 191 which is found on interstate 35, the highway connecting San Antonio and Austin. The artifact is presented as though it is a series of Google Maps searches of buildings found at intersection 191. Doing this as a way to present the project implies that the decorated shed of the future exists not only in the physical world but also in the digital interface. The buildings that have been rendered at the intersection are meant to represent the current and evolving state of the common roadside building which includes the way people are interacting with the building physically, programmatically, and by means of the Internet.