Breaching the perimeter
Description
As Americans witness the slow dissociation of the military from the civilian public, the need for a strong design initiative within military installations proves as applicable and necessary as it has always been. The role of the designer within the military is a longstanding and vigorously debated duty; the superficially disparate natures of the professions separate themselves on the premise of individual superiority, and isolate their fields of expertise from one another. However, the two microcosms retain an identity that may serve traditionally different clientele, but their purposes reflect and complement one another. This notion is best exemplified by the pedagogy often associated with architecture and the military: a community working tirelessly to construct a system best adapted to the public, regularly working with a client who does not have a clear vision of the resolution, but instead relies on the services of both occupations to not only visualize the outcome but to design the process as well. The all contingency of accredited designers within a typical military hierarchy have been tasked with creating a conducive living environment centralized around "the mission". While they have toiled endlessly to produce such a product, the unfortunate reality demonstrates that the weight of schematics has been typically relegated to grandsons of civil engineers and civilians with unrelated degrees and very little experience in a headquarter building hundreds of miles away. Bearing this in mind, the purpose of this thesis is to discover the greater organization of a military base, and to standardize it not according to chance doctrine, but soundly informed and localized knowledge of the surrounding environment. Such a design must be informed by a few key aspects; principally, the macro intention of such a layout must be centralized around "the mission", which in the case of most military bases, resembles a training and living environment conducive to deployment and combat effectiveness. Similarly, the determination of design must be within the scope of economic feasibility, which although quite gratuitous at first glance, is meagerly distributed throughout the separate branches and therein the country. Lastly, the design must have tenacity, as the ebb and flow of active duty populations produce an arbitrary fluctuation, but the life expectancy of such buildings is often projected within the fifty- to sixty-year time frame. Through careful research, and the benefit of personal interviews with clients who have spent collective centuries in the modern military, a design solution for the improved daily lives and increased combat effectiveness of the American military will serve to discuss the ways in which we can inform the macroevolution of military installations through dissecting the micro.