Two Strangers Meet in a Parking Lot

Creating New Cultural Dialogues through Design

Support for this work is provided by a Rocket Grants project award, a program of the Charlotte Street Foundation and the University of Kansas Spencer Museum of Art. Funding is provided by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.

The strange structures felt much better and even safer since they found the courage to talk to each other. After all, they would see each other in the vacant parking lot every day. Now the parking lot is a little less strange since the other inhabitants of the city see them conversing. They are now acquaintances! Lean-tos, sheds, even the old vacant store want to be their friends now!

This project consists of two transient or itinerant structures, characteristics not typically associated with built architecture. These architectural Strangers come to the city from some other location and confront each other in a vacant parking lot—one of the most open yet isolating places in the American city. While inhabiting the void of the parking lot, the Strangers become critical of it. These structures will be either welcomed, perceived as suspicious, or completely ignored.