Architecture for Urbanity

Designing architecture that reinforces urbanity starts with an intuitive understanding. Urban places are complex, containing many simple systems which combine to make a chaotic whole. This complexity is full of events, incidence and energy. In creating an architecture for urbanity, complexity is used to release the potential of a place to be urban.

The purpose of the building proposed by this thesis is to reinforce the ideas of urbanity in historic downtown Blacksburg. It supports the expansion of the downtown urban density along Main Street and at the same time provides an important urban node, manifesting the meeting of the Town of Blacksburg and the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. It is an architecture that supports urbanity.