P001 → For What It’s Worth
Counterculture and Autonomous Design
Course: ARCH204 Thesis Studio, Winter 2026, UC Berkeley
Primary Advisor: David Jaehning
Secondary Advisors: Maria Alvarez-Garcia, Greg Castillo
Other Acknowledgements: Charlie Boyd
Mural marking a squatted social center, 2009, photo by Josh MacPhee.
“The right to the city is not merely a right
to access what already exists, but a right to
change it after our heart’s desire. The right to
remake ourselves by creating a qualitatively
different kind of urban sociality is one of the
most precious human rights.”
In The Right to the City, David Harvey (working off concepts by Henri Lefebvre) states, “the right to the city is not merely a right to access what already exists, but a right to change it after our heart’s desire. The right to remake ourselves by creating a qualitatively different kind of urban sociality is one of the most precious human rights.”01 We are living in the most connected moment in human history, and one of the loneliest. The Bay Area didn’t just produce the technology that enables that paradox—it produced the ideology behind it. That inefficiency is waste. That if something can be mediated by a screen, it should be. The logic of Silicon Valley has quietly colonized not just our economy, but our sense of what space is for. This project is a refusal of that premise. A contemporary counterculture. Not nostalgic or anti-technology, but insisting on something that digital platforms cannot replace. This project examines the question:
What is the role of the architect in creating design that is meant to be autonomous?
The Bay Area has a history of countercultural movements. The Outlaw Builders (based in Point Reyes and including a Berkeley CED studio led by Sim Van der Ryn and Jim Campe) created unpermitted DIY structures and alternative living spaces often as a response to extreme housing costs and restrictive building codes.12 The Vats, based in San Francisco, was an artist commune in repurposed wine fermentation tanks in the SoMa during the 1960s-70s, where creatives lived and worked in these unconventional spaces until the city shut them down. Repeated small fires, police pressure and internal conflicts among Vats’ residents resulted in evictions and restricted access. The Hotel Owners Laundry Company squat (HOLC) was an artist collective and living space in a former industrial laundry building in San Francisco’s Mission District during the 1990s, where squatters created studios, performance spaces, and unconventional housing until their eventual eviction. Ghost Ship was an artist collective and live-work warehouse space in Oakland’s Fruitvale neighborhood that became the site of a fire in December 2016, killing 36 people during a music event exposing the tensions between the need for affordable artist housing and building safety regulations.
“We felt that in order to do things that were
creative, innovative, and affordable, you
couldn’t do it with permits. We called this
Outlaw Building.” Jim Campe
Ghost Ship after the 2016 fire, photo by Sharon Hahn Darlin.
As these examples illustrate–places like this tend to result in eviction or destruction. But the legal vulnerability is only part of the story. Land here is among the most expensive on the planet, held largely by private owners, institutional investors, or tech companies with the resources to defend it aggressively. Counterculture movements that depend on informality can be extraordinarily generative—but they’re building on borrowed time and on borrowed ground.
The Ghost Ship fire wasn’t just a tragedy—it triggered a wave of city inspections and evictions across the Bay Area that displaced dozens of DIY communities overnight. The fire became a pretext for clearing out the very spaces that rent pressure had pushed artists and organizers into in the first place. In the wake of the fire, Safer DIY Spaces was founded as a nonprofit made up of architects, contractors, artists, and community organizers. Their work is to find the DIY spaces that are most at risk of eviction or code enforcement action, and help them become legal before that happens. Shadetree is one of the few examples of what that actually looks like in practice.
Shadetree property in Oakland, CA. Photos by Leah Altman, 2026.
In Oakland, Shadetree began as an industrial building converted into affordable live/work space for artists. For decades it existed in that precarious middle ground: culturally vital, legally vulnerable. Then in 2017, facing demolition, the residents bought it. Tenants in combination with funding sources/organizations like Bay Area Community Land Trust and CAST (Community Arts Stabilization Trust) transformed Shadetree from a place that could be taken away into a place that couldn’t. But Shadetree started in 1979. You can’t squat your way to permanence anymore. The goal is a space that is legal, safe, and resistant to displacement from the start. Which brings us to the site.
“Shadetree is now an important model for other communities of artists to find the wherewithal to buy their building in Oakland.” Kelly Kahn, City of Oakland Policy Director for Art Spaces
Mission Hills Square residential, retail, and restaurant mixed-use project, located at 2501 Cormack Road in Fremont, concept. Gadsden Growth Properties.
Mission Hills Square was conceived as a 148-unit residential complex with 54,000 square feet of retail and restaurant space, positioned at a high-visibility location next to Interstate 680 in Fremont, CA. The project was financed through the EB-5 visa program—a federal scheme that allows wealthy foreign investors to obtain U.S. residency in exchange for investing in American development projects. The principals behind it, a San Jose attorney and her business partner, allegedly ran a fraudulent regional investment center, collecting at least $40 million from investors at $500,000 a head while concealing their control over the funds. The Securities and Exchange Commission filed a civil complaint in 2018. A federal grand jury indicted them in 2019. One of the principals fled the country and changed her name. The other pleaded not guilty. By 2020, construction had stopped entirely. Debris blocked the entrance. Graffiti covered the walls. What’s left is a 12.6-acre skeleton on one of Fremont’s most visible corridors. A monument to a development model that extracted money from investors, promised housing to a community that needed it, and delivered nothing.
Current state of the site. Google Street View. 2025.
The architecture that holds this together is built from what was already there, and what could be found cheaply. The existing concrete of the unfinished Mission Hills Square is reused. Wood construction fills in the gaps. Corrugated metal roofing covers what needs covering. Construction elevators, the kind typically dismantled the moment a building is complete, are retained as permanent vertical circulation. Inside, the living structures are built by the people who live in them. The architecture provides the frame—the egress, life safety systems, the structural envelope—and within that frame, tenants build. This can take shape as pop up shops/programs, nomadic kitchens, and scaffolding bedroom systems as well as collaborations between residents and architects like walls built out of wooden pallets using recycled clothing insulation.
Modular bed design by Bruno Munari.
The steep change in grade on the site submerges a large chunk of the structure underground– what was originally intended to be parking. That submerged level can still act as parking, but also a place to work on cars, camp, or store large things. The public entry resides at the lower corner of the plans with direct access to an open market area. This open air program is created through the cutting of the concrete floor slab above it– the concrete from which is then reused as walls in other areas of the building.
The other wing of the building acts as maker-space and informal programming that can develop as needed with stick frame walls and curtains acting as loose divisions. Mission Hills proposed 148 units of market-rate housing designed for individual households. A collective living model operates on completely different spatial assumptions that reduces the per-person footprint dramatically because residents share kitchens, bathrooms, common areas, and social infrastructure rather than each unit replicating all of those things. 148 market-rate units produces 148 separate households with no structural relationship to each other— neighbors who may never meet.
A collective living model of similar density produces a community who know each other and who have a stake in the common spaces of the building. The housing operates within the highway facing wing of the building with an exterior facade of scaffolding. This acts as circulation for tenants as well as acting as a new sort of billboard.
Every sleeping area requires two means of egress: the door or opening back into the shared space, and a compliant emergency escape opening in the exterior wall behind it. The architect installs the exterior openings as part of the frame. The tenants build their sleeping structures against them. The window placement can be determined by tenants as long as code is followed. The specific windows used can be standardized from a manufacturer like Milgard. The perimeter belongs to sleeping. The interior belongs to shared life.
The highest point of the structure is imagined to become a large outdoor concert venue: making this site a hub of entertainment. Fremont is an ethnoburb—a suburb that has been fundamentally shaped by its diaspora communities. Over sixty percent of its residents are Asian, over half were born outside the United States, and its Afghan-American population is the largest in the country. What Fremont lacks is not counterculture, but infrastructure for counterculture. The city has been reshaped by Silicon Valley’s economic pressure without receiving its resources, its cultural institutions, or its political attention. Its communities are being quietly displaced not through dramatic demolition but through the slow erosion of the spaces that make collective life possible.
Mission Hills Square was abandoned by the logic that built it. The money was extracted, the promises were broken, and what remained was a 12.6-acre hole in the fabric of a community that never got what it was owed. What this project proposes is replicable—industrial vacancies, abandoned properties, and stalled developments across the Bay Area, each one a potential site for the same logic applied differently. A collaboration between architects and community members to create spaces that are safe and legal first, so that the creative, social, and political acts that need to happen inside them actually can.
The result is spaces assembled from salvaged materials and tenant-built structures as well as a replicable methodology for doing the same in the industrial vacancies, stalled developments, and abandoned properties across the Bay Area that are waiting for a different logic to inhabit them.