Negotiating Form: Reconciling Two Philosophies of Making Through the Adaptive Reuse of the Petroleum Service Station

Abstract

The community workshop is a space where a group of individuals can collaborate and share knowledge and expertise to create customized products for themselves and their peers. These communities have crystalized around productive technologies such as the computer numerical controlled (CNC) router and the 3D printer, which minimize the advantages of economies of scale and enable individuals to compete with the entrenched systems of production and consumption. While these technologies present a more localized economy of making, they are imbued with two centuries of technological thought that eschew the innate qualities of the process of making in favour of a streamlined role within a highly choreographed system. This thesis oversees the development of a new community workplace on the site of a former service station which, through its dedication to the automobile and to a regimented approach to distribution, embodies a prescriptive model of technology. This intervention seeks to confront the prescriptive understanding of technology, based on interchangeability and the certainty of production, with an alternative growth model that is based on flexibility, fit, and uncertainty.