Alex Auriema:

Brie Mendoza:

Mikaela Neuvo:

Cortney Kirk:

In Fall 2006 Laura Haddad and Tom Drugan were visiting critics at the Rhode Island School of Design, where they taught an advanced design studio that looked at redefining the American archetype of the roadside attraction for the 21st centry, transforming the paradigm to appraise our car culture proclivity for expansion, exploration, entertainment, and consumption; and the proliverating effects on the landscape.

Each student designed a roadside attraction rooted in historic precedents but phsuing toward a new prototype addressing inherent issues between the art of the American highway (speed, scale, frontier, fantasy) and energy consumption (fossil fuel depletion, environmental degradation, sprawl, alternative energies).

To formulate concepts, students completed several short assignments prior to starting the larger site project. These included a postcard, a curio, a manifesto, and a billboard.

The site for the studio was Two Guns, a 120-acre parcel of high desert grassland on Interstate-40, thirty miles east of Flagstaff, Arizona. The beguiling limestone walled Canyon Diablo runs through the site, creating a variety of interesting spatial and ecological relationships. The site is accessed off the "Two Guns" exit and is currently vacant, although it is rife with ruins of past roadside establishments dating from the 1920s through 1990s, as well as fragments of previous highways. Through these ruins, the fascinatin historical progression of 20th-century roadside attractions is inscribed onto the site, making it a unique and unparalleled exhibit of the typology. Students layered onto this palimpsest the next version of the genre, deciding either to preserve, remodel, or remove the ruins.