The “mega museum” or museum designed by a superstar architect has become a common addition to cities around the world both large and small.... Show moreThe “mega museum” or museum designed by a superstar architect has become a common addition to cities around the world both large and small. The mega museum concentrates a collection of arts related functions in a single structure that is often either over-scaled for the neighborhood within which it placed or placed outside the urban center in order to make more room for an ever expanding collection of programs. Imagine Pilsen takes the mega museum’s collection of functions and spreads them throughout a three-block area of unoccupied buildings in Pilsen’s historic arts district. Rather than a single lateral or vertical volume, this project proposes eight programs within eight currently unoccupied structures. Eight buildings will express themselves as both architecturally unique to their individual programs and architecturally cohesive so as to be indentified and understood as individual parts and parts of a larger whole. Scale, material, color, structure and light will be utilized as common elements to allow for individual program expression and a cohesive identity available and obvious to the museum visitor. Museum visitors over the course of a day complete their three-block walk “through” of the museum or the museum reveals itself in parts to the visitor who discovers the museum’s components wholly over a longer period of time. Imagine Pilsen is a proposal for the decentralization of programming as a strategy for reinforcing the center of a once thriving community. M.S. in Architecture, December 2012 Show less