Assembling the Civic from the Margins
Inhabiting Uncertainty: Elevating Bridgeport's Future reclaims the neglected interstitial spaces of Bridgeport's East End (vacant lots, alleys, and rooftops) and transforms them into a resilient civic framework born from collective adaptation. In a neighborhood plagued by chronic flooding and absent public infrastructure, the project introduces an elevated network of platforms made from salvaged industrial materials: tires, washing machine drums, PVC piping, and scrap steel, sourced from nearby factories. These platforms connect second-floor windows, allowing movement when streets flood and enabling everyday life to expand into rooftop kitchens, gardens, drying zones, and shared gathering spaces. Overhead, a mesh canopy breathes, filters, shades, and grows. This system is not delivered; it is assembled, extended, and modified by residents over time, cultivating not only physical safety but a spatial culture of participation, agency, and care.
Uncertainty as a Design Condition
Rather than treating uncertainty as a risk to be resolved, the project embraces it as a driver of architectural thinking. As Werner Heisenberg's uncertainty principle demonstrates, indeterminism is fundamental to the smallest scales of nature, challenging architecture's traditional reliance on classical physics and ordered control. Following this conceptual framework explored in Rachely Rotem's studio "Designing with/for Uncertainty," the design responds not with permanence, but with systems that evolve, adapt, and remain incomplete by design. In Bridgeport, uncertainty manifests materially: floods erase streets, investment is absent, infrastructure fails. Drawing on a mathematical "infinite puzzle" model, the proposal reframes instability as spatial opportunity, echoing Yeoryia Manolopoulou's call for "productive uncertainty" that leaves room for urban emergence. Architecture becomes a response not to fixed outcomes but to open conditions, allowing change to shape both form and use. What emerges is not a masterplan, but a participatory scaffold: one that grows with people, adapts with need, and collaborates with context.
Architecture as Distributed Infrastructure
The design introduces a modular kit of parts: a system without a center, assembled across leftover urban gaps. Local industrial waste is repurposed: tires become flotation planters, drums act as structural supports, mesh forms walkways and canopies. Platforms span second-floor thresholds, forming elevated corridors for mobility during floods and shared extensions of domestic space in dry conditions. At the daycare, the system loops around the building, transforming walls into playgrounds and thresholds into classrooms. Nothing is ornamental; every element is tactical. As Michelle Addington argues in "Letting in the air," the architecture breathes and adapts to environmental forces rather than resisting them. Columns double as garden frames or anchor points; mesh shades and breathes while hosting vegetation. The architecture resists singular definition: spaces shift between cooking, gathering, teaching, planting, offering a responsive field that prioritizes use over prescription. This is not infrastructure imposed from above but a toolkit distributed from within.
