Magnolia Substation

Tucked within a quiet residential valley in the Magnolia neighborhood, a decommissioned City Light substation rests. Designed in the distinctive Streamline Moderne style by Ivan Palmaw in 1942, it provided power to residents at a safe voltage for over 50 years. Since losing the spark of its original function, the City Light Landscapes Team flipped the switch on how this building serves its community by turning its yard into a pollinator garden and beloved neighborhood amenity. Reimagining the concrete structure, students explored building and place through site walks, abstract mappings, and this project - a playful generation of architectural intervention proposals through the collaborative, surrealist game, Cadavre Exquis, or Exquisite Corpse.  

The existing substation plan was broken up into sextants on a single sheet of paper and folded so that pairs of students could draw within their region, overlapping slightly with their neighbors, without seeing the entire composition until each had their turn.

The resulting relationships are bizarre, imaginative, and humorously disjointed - removing logic based decision making from the generation of a new whole. This exercise put students in dialogue with their early intuitions about the site as well as the seemingly immovable form of the concrete substation