“It was the intensity of their vision coupled with their isolation in the wilderness, that caused them one and all to place on the canvas veritable capsules, surrounded by a line of color, to hold them off from a world which was most about them.”                            — William Carlos Williams, Painting in the American Grain

Rather than continuing the rhetoric of urban expansion by proposing another master plan, this project takes the form of a retreat. A retreat is a line: it holds things in and out. It moves away from one mode towards another, but does not try to define a new orthodoxy. Its inhabitation is temporary and its forms are fragmentary. It acknowledges that spatial scenarios within the city that are entropic have the potential to provide a scene in which to redefine inhabitation. This scenario within the contemporary city can be reframed as a (new form of) wilderness, in which inhabitation and social configuration can also become entropic.

Exploration of these themes began with studies of religious societies and pioneering efforts that existed along the shifting border of the United States. These societies, which included The Shakers, The Moravians, The Rappites, The Owenites and The True Perfectionists, were investigated not for their theological and eschatological systems as such, but rather for their desire to invert architectural typologies and hierarchies in order to seek new possibilities within the logic of domestic space. In these communitarian societies, notions of public versus private, and individual versus common are in a continuous process of redefinition. This redefinition could only take place within the logic of the wilderness. This research culminated in a visit to multiple historic sites, which had been inhabited by these radical groups.