Everything is bigger in Texas, or not. The saying indeed reflect the vast geography of its political boundaries, yet its territory—like many others in the country’s extension, is also comprised of much smaller groupings that reflect other forms of assembly. Some of these groupings are, even in Texas, significantly small, or mini. TEXAS MINI-POLEIS is a fourth year undergraduate research-and-design architecture studio investigating Texas’ five smallest-population yet fully-incorporated cities. Although these groupings are formalized under legal statutes and incorporated as cities, their formulations reveal—and this is one of the main interests for this project, the motivations to assemble a political territory and boundaries and their spatial and formal outputs. In an effort to reconsider the heavily studied and complex web of cities and dense urban scenarios, this studio aims to examine some of those definitions on locations that easily escape their common understanding, yet are defined by the same legal protocols and politics. The studio was compiled and transformed into a 430 pages book.
Studio members: Ashley Baughman, Bryson Bounds, Daniel Eynon, Carolina Fernandez, Mitzy González, Christopher Loofs, Stephanie Maddamma, Jordan Marshall, Samantha Offutt and Maclane Regan.
Marcelo López–Dinardi 