long term motel.

The long term motel taps into a range of vernacular typologies to contrast the surrounding fulfillment center landscape. Surrounded by isolated warehouses, where workers vary from seasonal to full-time and from college student to near-retiree2, the site calls for a space to mediate these disparate parties.
Amazon and other corporations have been criticized for their monopoly over the digital marketplace and for their poor labor conditions. Long hours, poor lighting, and menial labor, are masked by a facade of benefits; which perpetuates a cycle of exploitation for which many people have no alternative.

In response, this social housing project presents itself as an alternative. Its blank face acts as a backdrop for the workers to form unions, while subversivly engaging the surrounding machine landscape. The curved massing of the building sweeps across the northern boundary of the site, which exaggeates the perspectival effect and yet also mediates between the warehouses in front and the dense forest behind.

The space generated by the building's curve produces a plaza, open for everything from raves, to protests, to drive-in theaters. Meanwhile, the existing roads and parking infrastructures become a part of the overall landscape, transforming the motel and fulfillment centers into a neighborhood of extra-large buildings conected by a bus route system.

The exterior curve of the building prevents one from seeing the massing in its entirety. However, a public corridor cuts straight through the length of the interior, making it possible to see down the entire length of the building. This interior avenue bifurcates the massing into public and private halves, with through-connections at the plaza and forest made via cuts in the massing. The domestic units face the northern plaza between the cuts created for circulation, while the public amemtJes open up to the southern forest, united under the single, overarching curve of the roof.

Within each unit and public space, an array of highly­programmed walls contain the necessary infrastructure for living. The public amenities draw from Soviet worker clubs where programs are meant to facilitate conversations, conducive to the formation of labor unions, like lounges, libraries, auditoriums, dining halls, and other informal and formal meeting spaces. Meanwhile, the domestic units range in size and shared amenities, allowing for flexibile inhabitation, shared spaces, and ranges of kinship structures.

At the heart of this project rest the domestic units. Somewhere between motel and home, this housing project tries to addresses the precarious, temporary employees of the warehouse industry. Pulling from the tradition of japanese houses and the layout of shotgun homes, the shared kitchens, interior courtyards, and light-filled bedrooms of the units are arranged linearly, bridging the ambiguous line between domestic program and public life.