PROJECT TYPE

Research

Visual Design

3D Modeling

MY ROLE

Researcher

Visual Designer

TOOL

Adobe Photoshop

Adobe Illustrator

Adobe Indesign

Rhinocerous 

TEAM

Yuxin Chen

INTENTION

To challenge a futuristic interaction between humans, machines, and roads.

EXPLORATION

Since the emergence of automobile technology, Route 66 was derived in 1926 as the most significant infrastructure in US history that once stood for the American culture and brought drivers all the way to the West. On one hand, it gathered people from every corner of the United States through the language of cars and transcontinental roads; on the other hand, the road itself then disperses those people towards different destinations, letting them explore and experience the vernacular cultures.

However, in 1985, the US highway system abandoned this glorious infrastructure due to the increasing needs of traffic volume, replacing the Route 66 with wide, careless and busy interstate highways, and leaving the route with ghost towns, rusted billboards, and derelict car graveyard—but nonetheless a still amazing road-side experience. Through research on the existing Historic Route 66 of the United States, this thesis imagines the revival of Route 66 with the mobility, scale, and technology of future automobiles in mind to bring the passion and emotion back to the magnificent infrastructure. The proposal investigates an alternative way to translate the automobile infrastructure under the assumption of an invisible, omnipotent technology that combines the interface of cars and roads as “one system”, and meanwhile to challenge the fundamental relationship and interaction between humans, machines, and roads. 

Here, the thesis proposes a “detour-able” infrastructure system with four distinctive versions of America, each branching into the vernacular economy, landscape, or activities - the Bourgeois Wine Tour, the Trunk Mercato, the Daredevil Dirt Drive, and the DIY Deja-vu. Each of the four narratives features an ignored historic town extracted from existing cultural and infrastructural contexts along the Route 66, and will be reinterpreted in the autonomous future to effectuate a new mobile network of connections rooted in an expandable/retractable ruralism.

PROCESS

RESULT

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