DESIGN STUDIO 5.2 - 
TEARS OF A
DORMANT CATASTROPHE
 

After the completion of the Panama Canal in 1910, Muller House was developed as a timber framed tenement building providing housing for the unemployed. Offering a financial incentive for the detection of fire within the building, residents instigating their own fires became trapped within an paradoxical architectural existence taught between housing and torture. In attempting to decipher Panama City, the project asks: What would have happened if Muller House did catch fire?

Mapping the urban distribution from the fall out of tragedy, cartographically mapped against contemporary leisure/ ignorance, a compound urban network unveils the fragmented scars of the Tears of a Dormant Catastrophe. Reinventing the response towards housing for the unemployed triggers an interrogation of the previous building as an audience to its self-imparted trauma, generating negative receptacles to form palimpsestuous architectural devices that deliver the fragmented dispersal into satellite nests circum[re]ferential to Muller’s lexical identity.

As each nested settlements spawns from the imparted catastrophe lines engraved into each site, a tectonic dialect spoken between the timber enclosures and masonry groundscapes is entwined via a series of peripatetic spatial and programmatic thresholds with the ebullience of screened enshroudments. These derive a new language of fire protection within each construction in response to the screening, compartmentation, alarms and escapes required, coercing each construction under the combustive responses that may have saved the original Muller House from the nightmare that it never faced.