The Garden in the Grid: A High-Density Rural Living Spatial Logic

The disconnect between cities (culture), nature and agriculture has had a problematic impact on human existence. Nature, at least within Western ideology, is perceived as hostile to the cultural project resulting in the alteration and destruction of systems necessary for human existence. Farming once a core part of the American ethos and its spatial organization has been taken over by large industrial agriculture. Its outcome: disease, obesity and a loss in community.
      If the urban project could engage natural systems as equals to produce a synthetic construct of interactions and dependencies all able to be understood and operative within a public realm, the outcome ought to be a new model for future land development.
      This thesis proposes a new spatial framework for what we know as residential living: a scaffolded, modular structure that dissolves the boundaries of conventional dwelling and redefines the home as a state of adjacency, openness, and spatial interdependence. Drawing from Japanese architecture’s spatial principles, defining interior space by transition, permeability, and proximity rather than enclosure, the project rejects fixed-use programming and expansive footprints in favor of flexible, layered, and relational spatial logic. Within this system, living conditions become fragmented - porous and flexible - allowing for moments of overlap, shared occupation and privacy. The scaffolding serves not only as a structural device, but as the infrastructural medium through which new forms of living emerge. By reimagining housing as a connective spatial field rather than a collection of isolated units, the project challenges the dominance of complete object-based architectural typologies and proposes instead a distributed, incomplete, and evolving spatial condition for community life.