Piecemeal Urbanism

Published February 7, 2023

Piecemeal Urbanism looks to capture the dynamic and unpredictable life of buildings that traditional photos, drawings, and models cannot fully capture. Morgan Mansfield explored methods of visualizing transformation of architecture through the continual change of these buildings to ask how a representational toolkit can respond to architecture’s temporal nature.

Mansfield studied catalog and tract houses within Buffalo and the nearby Town of Tonawanda. These established and initially homogeneous neighborhood architectures allow for a direct comparison of the modified homes to their original state. By exploring the existing conditions of these building typologies through photographs of each site, catalog resources, and drawings, Mansfield was able to observe the way suburban neighborhoods, like Tonawanda’s Green Acres, have transitioned from serially produced copies into a unique urban condition. Homeowners lead the adaptations through their accumulation of needs and desires that result in the piecemeal urbanism that was never intended. Speculative drawings were created by Mansfield to leverage and project upon the large number of individual changes to a neighborhood, depicting a new collective future. Through photographic layering, collage, and drawing, architecture can be seen to represent the collective decisions of several years through multiple owners. This type of architectural representation challenges the de - signer’s assumption that buildings are static, instead celebrating evolution and individualized response. Mansfield proposes that these changes can inspire code and zoning changes over time, which would allow the single-family units to transform into buildings that could better serve the public in response to the customization and do-it-yourself mentality of these homeowners.

Drawing representing the process of customization of piecemeal urbanism