A6 — OJILUSAN

Urban Underground

Citation of Excellence in Design Research

Undergraduate Directed Research [Thesis]

Spring 2026

Instructors: Edgar Rodriguez + Jess Myers

The Urban Underground is a three-channel film installation investigating the recurring spatial condition produced when informal occupation exceeds what the city is structured to tolerate. The project emerged from an interest in how certain spaces in the city hold entire subcultures, and how those spaces are consistently overlooked, displaced, and erased by the systems that govern the built environment. Rather than studying architecture as stable form, it approaches space as something continually rewritten through use, tracing what gets left behind when informal occupation is regulated and removed.

Drawing from the political lineage of constructivist, situationist, provotarian, and post-punk movements, the project argues that informal occupation is not marginal behavior but a legible political production of space that operates outside architectural authority.

The research was conducted through site visits, photographic documentation, and archival research across four sites in in the North East, each selected for where it sits in a moment of transition between occupation and erasure.

The film moves across three scales: the urban surface of unassuming facades that reveal nothing of what they hold, the interior scale of bodily occupation, and the detail scale of traces that redefined the space. These spaces are not failures of design. They are a socialization power that exposes the limits of architectural authority and questions what the discipline is permitted to authorize.

Zine Spread 1

2_Unrolled Zine Poster

Zine Spread 2

Zine Spread 3

Zine Spread 4

3_Film Analysis

Zine Spread 5

Zine Spread 6

4_Installation Photo

5_Installation Photo

Zine Spread 7

6_Installation Photo

Zine Spread 8

Zine Spread 9

Zine Spread 10

7_Everson Museum Projection