The cultural obsession with brand and identity shapes metroburban public life today to no lesser an extent than it does the commercial sphere. Traditional ideals of citizenship have given way to the media-savvy demographic profiling of Claritas Corp.’s sixty-four cluster/ lifestyle groups; we have gone from the civic ideal of e pluribus unum to the individual profiling of pluribus maximus. Today’s urban dweller is a member/consumer of not one, but many differing communities---traveling from place to place to experience or satisfy different aspects of her lifestyle. (S)he lives in one neighborhood, works in another, has dinner in a third, and goes weekend shopping at yet another. What makes these truly unique and unusual experience that offers an other way of being in the city/world. On the other hand, they almost always rely (as perhaps best emblematized in the gated community) on policies of exclusion in order to secure that same singularity. This proposal for a “big box community”, titled Duck-and Cover in reference to its interest in advancing the discourse introduced by Venturi’s Duck and Decorated Shed, puts forth an architectural strategy-cum-business plan which harnesses the vagaries of private investment and NIMBYism to act as a Trojan horse of sorts: one that proffers a new politics of urban community and public life. The community of affiliation it produces cuts across, rather than reinforces existing social divisions, undermining previous models of theme, identity politics and special interest.
