The amount of public space dedicated to parking the private vehicle in Philadelphia is almost double the total SF area of Center City’s four major public parks. ParkTheVoid is an interactive, educational installation that reprograms the privatized parking spot as a public social space, while also revealing the unequal open space distribution between vehicular parking and public park.

Within an extruded volume, the poetic absence of the car acts as a provocative graphic statement - the subtracted vehicle literally provides opportunities for pedestrian seating, shade, and buffer, through which the street is newly framed and viewed. Superimposed on this corrugated cardboard armature is an abstract city grid that subdivides the volume into accurately scaled pieces of “public park.” These pieces total the open space required to collectively arrange Philadelphia’s 14,500 metered parking spots. Adjusting the pieces within the grid, the public creates varied seating arrangements at one scale, but also rethinks the city at the urban scale.

2008 Winner, [spot] national design competition for Philadelphia National Design Week

2008 Installed on-site on Walnut Street, between 15th and 16th Streets, Philadelphia, PA

2008 Exhibited at the Old American Can Factory, Brooklyn, NY

2010 “Rethinking Design,” The Pennsylvania Gazette, Nov - Dec 2010, p. 69 - 70
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