Pitstop Confessional

This conceptual project considers the region of the South to be a vibrant historical artifact with a valuable future tense. The Pitstop Confessional positions the cultural lineage of the saloon and roadside diner typologies within their contemporary highway context and critiques the morphology of the Southern dining experience from the one-room house to the asphalt edgescapes of suburbia. Waffle House is designed as a truer version of itself – a roadside sanctuary. An assertion is made through spatial gestures, allusions to religious rituals, and the written word that the Waffle House dining experience – however detached from the presuppositions society has about communal eating – is a spiritual activity that fulfills patrons’ desires for redemption and salvation under a pretense of affordable, transit-oriented happiness. The Fountain of Youth, the Hymnal, and the Call to Prayer are metaphors embedded in Waffle House.

Drawing upon the speed and linearity of the automobile, the redemptive aspects of comfort food, and the dynamics between public and private experience at Waffle House, the Pitstop Confessional is a Southern sanctuary for highway pilgrims to find repose along their Westward journey. The project becomes a more real manifestation of what Waffle House means.