Micropolitan America

In “View of the World from 9th Avenue,” the March 29, 1976 cover of The New Yorker magazine, Saul Steinberg presented a critical representation of the world as seen from the vantage point of the metropolis. “Micropolitan America” offers an alternative construction of this perspective, shifting the lens away from the vast, formless megalopolis, and positioning it on the archipelago of micro- urban clusters rendered invisible in the hyper-context of the urbanized American countryside. Turning our gaze on the miniature cities of the American hinterland, we see the social, political, economic, and environmental fissures produced by the deployment of planetary networks of capitalist urbanization.

The exhibition and opening talk on January 17 features a collection of student drawings that reflect on the current reality in the hinterland and project, distort, or accelerate it into absurd yet familiar fantasies found within abstract futures. What emerges is a kind of magical realism in the countryside that functions as a critical reading of the present. Suspending judgment and daring to look at the overlooked, stereotyped and often demonized places of the American countryside, the students who participated set out on multiple road trips to the micro-urban archipelago, recording all its life, fears, paranoia, paradoxes, and hope — with architecture always in the rear-view mirror. The drawings condense radical representations of the findings of these trips. Using the tools of architecture to record what is there without an intention to fix it, the drawings imagine and design with and within these conditions.

The exhibition is designed by Kyriakos Kyriakou (University of Texas at Austin) & Sofia Krimizi
(Architectural Association) and features student work from advanced studios and elective seminars at the Huckabee College of Architecture at Texas Tech University, the Univerity of Texas at Austin School of Architecture, and the Gerald D. Hines College of Architecture and Design, University of Houston. 

"Micropolitan America" is sponsored by the Hines Scholar as Design/ Design as Scholar (HdSd) Program at the University of Houston Gerald D. Hines College of Architecture and Design and the Dick Clark Endowment, Gensler Exhibitions Endowment, and Sinclair Black Endowed Excellence Fund at the University of Texas at Austin School of Architecture.