DOLLAR GENTLE CYCLE


Dollar Gentle Cycle is a pop-up exhibition that gently cycles the resources of UW-Milwaukee’s School of Architecture and Urban Planning (SARUP) through Dollar General Corporation (DG) in a vacant retail space on Milwaukee’s Historic Mitchell Street - where the two organizations are neighbors - to understand the ways both institutions grant and restrict resources for the communities they purport to serve. As the only school of architecture in Wisconsin and the foremost dollar store in the region, SARUP and DG play critical roles in influencing large-scale commercial practices and small-scale mom-and-pop-corner-shop conditions across the Midwestern United States. Krug and Aziz polled workers from every DG store in Wisconsin and compiled consolidated donation lists from community support groups on Mitchell Street and around Milwaukee to glean insights into the type of dollar-store items that facilitate civic life in the city, then used resources from SARUP to purchase each of the requested items in bulk from Dollar General. The workers and organizations Krug and Aziz consulted supplied these products, which appear in a faux Dollar General in a storefront leased by SARUP’s Mobile Design Box and adjacent to Dollar General store #19014.

The project builds upon Milwaukee’s history of using retail operations to challenge the standardization imperative and blur categorical distinctions between economy, belonging, and commodity; this legacy extends from Clarence Saunders’ Piggly Wiggly system for human and object automation to James Wines’ BEST Supermarket on Brown Deer Road. By folding the institutional ecologies of higher education into the physical spaces of America’s fastest-growing retail empire, the exhibition compresses the flow of object and building life cycles, labor practices, resource distribution, and logistics management, and puts them into conversation with each other.
Supported by:
University of Colorado Denver, College of Architecture and Planning
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, School of Architecture and Urban Planning

Exhibited at:
Mobile Design Box (2022)

Collaborator:
Lindsey Krug

Facilitators:
Ana Skolnik, Andres Comacho, Franziska Burkard, Jacob Rohan, Marshall Reilly, Natalie Kuehl, Ryan Bramlett

Photos by:
Abby Platz, Sarah Aziz

DOLLAR GENTLE CYCLE


Dollar Gentle Cycle is a pop-up exhibition that gently cycles the resources of UW-Milwaukee’s School of Architecture and Urban Planning (SARUP) through Dollar General Corporation (DG) in a vacant retail space on Milwaukee’s Historic Mitchell Street - where the two organizations are neighbors - to understand the ways both institutions grant and restrict resources for the communities they purport to serve. As the only school of architecture in Wisconsin and the foremost dollar store in the region, SARUP and DG play critical roles in influencing large-scale commercial practices and small-scale mom-and-pop-corner-shop conditions across the Midwestern United States. Krug and Aziz polled workers from every DG store in Wisconsin and compiled consolidated donation lists from community support groups on Mitchell Street and around Milwaukee to glean insights into the type of dollar-store items that facilitate civic life in the city, then used resources from SARUP to purchase each of the requested items in bulk from Dollar General. The workers and organizations Krug and Aziz consulted supplied these products, which appear in a faux Dollar General in a storefront leased by SARUP’s Mobile Design Box and adjacent to Dollar General store #19014.


The project builds upon Milwaukee’s history of using retail operations to challenge the standardization imperative and blur categorical distinctions between economy, belonging, and commodity; this legacy extends from Clarence Saunders’ Piggly Wiggly system for human and object automation to James Wines’ BEST Supermarket on Brown Deer Road. By folding the institutional ecologies of higher education into the physical spaces of America’s fastest-growing retail empire, the exhibition compresses the flow of object and building life cycles, labor practices, resource distribution, and logistics management, and puts them into conversation with each other.

Supported by:
University of Colorado Denver, College of Architecture and Planning
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, School of Architecture and Urban Planning

Exhibited at:
Mobile Design Box (2022)

Collaborator:
Lindsey Krug

Facilitators:
Ana Skolnik, Andres Comacho, Franziska Burkard, Jacob Rohan, Marshall Reilly, Natalie Kuehl, Ryan Bramlett

Photos by:
Abby Platz, Sarah Aziz