RE-IMAGINING

E-WASTELAND

CCA Thesis Studio Spring 2023

The project is a new urban re- and up-cycling center for e-waste on the site of the existing Apple Store in the heart of downtown San Francisco’s Union Square. The Apple Store is perhaps one of the most potent symbols of capitalistic consumerism, the culture of planned obsolescence, throw-away culture and the aesthetics of desire.The thesis exploration imagines taking over this iconic space urban space by reimagining it as a new typology of civic building, one more honest about the economic, cultural, and environmental mechanisms that make it function. This research proposes that this new typology of civic infrastructural buildings can help to resist the too easy “out-of-sight and out-of-mind” mentality. It is critical the buildings that sustain our consumerism begin to also reveal that infrastructure that creates it as critical components of our downtowns and urban landscapes.