Before we start to design, the studio was looking into a show called "Small Museum for the American Metaphor" which was on display in REDCAT in 2014.

42 objects were selected by OFFICE KGDVS. All of them are consciously blurring the distinction between object and representation. The metaphor is a base for a possible architecture that blurs the distinction between building and object, collapses different scales.

The studio is to design something in the middle of nowhere - the desert. In 1982 Reyner Baham published Scenes in America Deserta, in which he depicted his trips around America West. and for our studio trip we were trying to cover the same route as Reyner had. During the trip we encountered various culture, extreme climate and also, for sure, the endless nothing.  Each design in the studio is an enormous one single building that can contain the whole city. In Geer’s term, a "vacuum cleaner" that can absorb all the existing environment into one form, becoming a practical utopia.

Six sites were assigned, in which the population range from 700 to 10 thousand. This project is in the first mesa of the Hopi Mesas and the population is 1,500.

I found spiral and concentric Circles are one of the symbols in Hopi culture. In their origin story, They are instructed to walk to the world's farthest corners, to learn the earth with their feet and to find their Center Place.

The construction view of the building shows the dome with a diameter of 500 meters, supported by a set of concrete skeleton and covered with transformable textile. In response to the climate, this design can act as a shelter for the city inside. With openings at the bottom and at the top center, this structure also helps ventilation in the area, letting in cool air from the bottom and hot air goes up and away, creating a comfortable breeze in it.

The concentric circle in the plan starts to divide different function of the city - the outer circle for transportation, a ring of housing, then cultivation, and then an area for all the infrastructure like the hospital, schools and so on.

The slice of the zoomed in plan. The gradient of various functions contains public service in the middle and private rooms on the outside. Each slice is sharing the public services in the center, but they also have their own little community center in the outer ring.