Hot Rodding & Retrofitting

 Retrofitting suburbia is an interesting concept to me that I think isn’t talked about or utilized enough.  I always thinks it cool walking into a space that used to be something kind of old and somewhat boring, such as a big box Walmart and it has been repurposed in order to make it into something a lot cooler and that people will actually want to use.  This in my opinion does nothing but make the surrounding community more engaging and interactive.  Taking something like a big box that used to be a Walmart and adding some things to it to fit a different purpose, instead of building something from scratch is also more sustainable.  It is very expensive to building something from nothing and a lot cheaper to just retrofit what is already there.  This all reminds me of a concept that Tom Kundig brings up sometimes in his practice.  The concept of “hot-rodding” as he calls it, is taking what is already there and adding some other cool stuff to it to make the sum of the parts better than what was originally there in the beginning.  He even named his own house the Hot Rod House because it looks like a typical suburban home that has all of the typical Olson-Kundig attachments and moving elements which in the end make it much more interesting than it was when it was just a regular normal looking and kind of boring house.  This concept has always been interesting to me and I think it is something that needs to be looked at more, especially when thinking about the question of what to do with suburbia.