Brendan Pearce

The National Midway 

Supervisor: Professor Justyna Karakiewicz

The utopian city is located in another space, its blessed uniqueness partly explained by its isolation, perfect societies that by their very essence are fundamentally unreal and exclusive. The design of the National Mall is the product of an ideology realised in terms of architecture, a constellation of neoclassical monuments that trace the myth of empire from Ancient Rome, all the way to the White House. These monuments impose a vision of social order, however is exclusive of the real nature of chaotic humanity, displaying no awareness of the contradiction it exposes by its proximity to this humanity and the real lived experience of Washington, D.C..

The monuments symbolically draw on classical architectural language to bring legitimacy to that particular utopian vision of society, a tactic used in the World’s fair of 1893, from which the current design of Washington, D.C. draws inspiration. The carnivalesque tradition that creates an ‘inside-out’ social setting through the subversion of established hierarchies and the dominant order, is missing from Washington, D.C., yet present in its influences. This thesis addresses the shortcoming in the design of the National Mall through a re-interpretation of the symbolism inherent in its architectural language. Through the intervention of a fair designed through the lens of the carnivalesque, this design explores the manifestation of utopian space, the realisation of the ideal city, heterotopia, the carnivalesque, the grotesque and monumentality.