4A STUDIO: SPECULATIVE HOUSE

Fall 2017

“A caveman never set out looking for a 2-bedroom cave”

-Jeff Kipnis

Mis-registration, glitches, clumsy posture, misfit, misalignment, mis-reading, etc; these are some terms that refer to a strain of contemporary architecture involved in the effective deviation from a norm or convention.

An example can be found in Colin Rowe’s discussion on the Frame in early 20th century Europe in relation to its more practical counterpart in Chicago. Whereas the Chicago frame was understood as a unifying element of space and structure, the frame in Europe was conceived of as “an autonomous structure that perforates a freely abstracted space, acting as its punctuation rather than its defining form.” This relaxing of relations between architectural elements (or systems) is quite different today due to advances in representational techniques, aesthetic theory, philosophy, and a sensibility that is a direct outcome of digital media. Extending this discourse the project engages in eccentric deviations between massing and surface articulation with an eye towards synthesizing them with the development of interiority, its relation to ground, and apertures.

In the process of developing three schemes that show the relation of the center to the overall massings, one begins to question if there is one center or multiple centers active in the overall organization. How is /are the center[s] manifested? Is it with voids, objects, tectonics, equipment, etc. An example of this political differance between these choices, Albert Einstein detested the idea of a single center in relation to the understanding of the cosmos. The single center model predated modern science when it was believed that the earth was at the center of the universe. The traditional vernacular dwelling has a fireplace in the center. This is an object that physically marks the center, is visible on the exterior, and serves as the social center. It would belong to the single center model, opposing Einstein’s notion.

“Spatial form rests on a different epistemological basis today in comparison to three, four, or five decades ago. As such, Rowe’s distinction between classical nine-square versus modern four-square grids, which he extracted from Palladio and Le Corbusier, can be replaced with a discussion about the relationship between volumetricaly-defined centripetal versus itinerant organizations - between structures that define a center and those that explicitly avoid a center.”