There is an avenue in the western United States that cuts across the entire spectrum of urban and rural conditions. At 26 miles, it is the longest continuous commercial street in the United States. It runs from the town of Golden at the base of the Rocky Mountains to the town of Strasburg, just out of view from their peaks in the rural great plains. It crosses through four counties, eight townships, and one major metropolis. Playboy magazine once called it “the longest, wickedest street in America.” Colfax Avenue collapses the American condition into a single line, slicing through both the wealthiest (80238) and most economically challenged (80204) zip codes in Colorado. Largely built out in the mid-twentieth century and then subsequently left fallow, its stock of commercial buildings, bars, night clubs, motels, restaurants, and gas stations are remarkably well preserved. Colfax is a microcosm of the American landscape: mundane, industrious, worn, garish, polished, and dulled.

Colfax’s contested history, its troubled present, and its wildly diverse mix of contexts makes it a compressed and syncopated analogy for the array of conditions that are pervasive across the urban, suburban, mountainous, and rural conditions of the entire country. Evaluating the mundane and vernacular conditions found across it reveals an analogy of contemporary life. When taken in its entirety, it exposes an array of conditions rendered self-similar by the flatness of the street itself. 
This studio will make a deep examination of this context’s many idiosyncrasies and particularities in order to build a lexicon of intensely local urban form and construction typologies. We will use this catalog to build a reflective language of architecture that comments and builds upon this context to generate architectural novelty.

Each student, taking a section of Colfax Avenue, will develop a project type reflective of that section and projective of its architecture. Each student will mine their corridor of Colfax Avenue to devise their own project brief within the confines of one or some combination of the following four programs: Motel, Theatre, Casino, Strip Mall. Students will be asked to analyze, stretch, destroy, and reconstruct the models and physical typologies that these ‘programs’ represent to the boundaries of their own individually conceived polemic. Students will likewise be asked to examine a single specific construction method common to the region to pull on it for local particularities that can be likewise extrapolated.

Students will work individually on projects that engage in the production of digitally produced and highly graphic work represented in printed media both in flatness and in the form of physical models. There will be a midterm and final assessment along with two periodic assessments at the quarter-marks.