DMV / RCP : Inside the Agency
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Howard, Olivia Neugebauer
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Howard, Olivia Neugebauer. 2022. DMV / RCP : Inside the Agency. Master's thesis, Harvard Graduate School of Design.Abstract
The Department of Motor Vehicles is a state agency full of contradictions: originally established for the purpose of abating the public nuisance of speeding drivers, the agency is now imprinted upon the cultural imaginary as a public nuisance itself. Though it is an arm of the state government fundamentally important to our democracy, charged with granting identification and voter rights, no agency is more loathed across the population. In spite of helping itself to all the rhetoric of scientific management, boasting a modern, efficient, cost-effective and convenient service, it remains an infuriatingly ineffective process, requiring long wait times and frustrating paperwork. To so many Americans then, accustomed to convenience and service, the Department of Motor Vehicles has paradoxically become a cultural counter-icon to the American way of life.My thesis recasts the current organization of the DMV experience by retrofitting one particular branch of the agency in Detroit, Michigan. In recent years, the former General Motors Headquarters and other tall office buildings in the New Center were bought by the state of Michigan and transformed into state administrative offices. This project intervenes on the first two floors of the General Motors building by inserting a new spatial ceiling-scape into the deep plan to host the DMV and the Department of Records. The proposed ceiling shapes this continuous interior office space into a series of rooms at different scales, which differentiate between public atria and intimate examining rooms, embodying the biometric and individualizing processes of the DMV as spatialized interfaces between the individual, the pubic, and the state. The processes of this new DMV, drawn out along the entire extent of the queue become both all waiting, or no waiting at all.
While the ceiling is often added as an afterthought, I put forward the reflected ceiling plan as a site of invention in redirecting hierarchy, program, and spatial differentiation. As Raymond Hood once said, “the plan is of primary importance because on the floor are performed all the activities of the human occupants," - implying the plan is the primary instrument of getting things done efficiently. But at the DMV, people spend most of their time waiting, that is, not doing anything. Here, more than the plan, it is the ceiling, with its atmospheric and immersive attributes, that can operate as a tool for activating and reclaiming this idleness as the instigator for the creation of a collective, bringing together the waiting public, and transforming the DMV into a new civic type.
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