A continuous civic landscape reimagines an underutilized industrial enclave outside Knoxville. Drawing from the site’s history of postwar prefabrication, the project consolidates housing, fabrication and public amenities into a nested elliptical form that focuses activity inward while remaining porous to its surroundings. Interlocking prefabricated residential units reduce corridors and create micro-communities, while large CLT and steel civic volumes support making, gathering and everyday life. Locally produced terra cotta and layered envelopes filter light and scale, allowing the building to operate simultaneously as infrastructure, neighborhood and landscape.
The section articulates how permanence emerges from layered occupation rather than fixed form. A continuous roof spans a series of nested volumes, while sectional variation accommodates changing programs over time, allowing the building to absorb flux without losing spatial coherence.
This study examines prefabricated housing systems through the RES4 framework, analyzing how modular construction can balance repetition and variation. By testing unit aggregation, structural logic, and spatial flexibility, the work evaluates prefab architecture as an adaptable system rather than a fixed product, capable of responding to social, economic and material constraints over time.
This project was completed in Graduate Studio III under Prof. Maged Guergis.