USPS+
Cohen Hudson
Rice University
From the Jury:
“It’s beautifully simplistic. As a form, it’s just easy and perfect. And the sustainability — the woods, the timber — is not hidden. It’s really in your face. And I like that. It’s there; it’s bulky; it’s up to the last detail and really part of the architecture and the beauty of the building itself.” — Fokke Moerel
A proposal for a new post office in San Antonio, USPS+ pursues economic and environmental equality in multiple ways. It envisions the post office as a site of public life by broadening its functions to include banking, printing, polling, and other services. It also leverages the modular logic of mass timber technologies to offer a repeatable, adaptable, and infinitely reproducible structural framework. The frame can stack and rotate, allowing construction at multiple scales and in different settings. In addition to the ecological benefits of mass timber, widespread adoption of the design — a post office in every ZIP Code — could redistribute wealth from urban to rural areas through domestic manufacturing, stimulating the national economy.