A built study of the Zip System wall — the sheathing membrane sweeping new tract development outside New Braunfels, Texas — framed as a question about what props up the economy of a remote, ordinary place.
What does it mean to research a remote part of a city in the United States — and is there a way its economy is propped up that can actually be studied? Mayfield, outside New Braunfels, Texas, is just one new case of a kind of development sweeping the country: entire subdivisions wrapped in identical Zip System sheathing.
This piece mimics that construction directly. A real stud wall is framed, sheathed, and drywalled the way a tract house would be — but the "view" through it is a printed collage built from the Zip System's own logos and panel seams, repeated until they read as a skyline. The wall becomes a mirror held up to curb appeal: the same ordinary system, repeated at the scale of a country.