As We May Think by jackson-studio

aswe may think

jackson studio, 2019â&#x20AC;&#x201C;2020

Vardan Asatryan Leo Cailles Brianna DeLeon Riley Eum Minh Hong Logan Kozlik Luany Leone Yuran Liu Maya Mashiach Nicole Sarwono Levi Schmitt Ethan Scofield Tess Stilman Miri Taple Navaya Vishnoi Lena Vogler Natalie Wanjek Benjamin Wassink Kanata Yamayoshi

Foreword

Doug Jackson Marc-Antoine Laugier’s Essai sur l’architecture, famous for its origin story in support of an essentialist architecture, describes human ingenuity in constructing a primitive hut from fallen branches in a forest. These are ordered into posts and lintels to provide a rational structure that, in turn, serves as a framework for his subsequent rationalization of architecture. The only mention of scaffolding in his treatise curiously characterizes it as “dangerous.” In the absence of any further

elaboration on this point, one is tempted to speculate about the motivation for such a comment. Perhaps, of its many possible dangers, the least obvious but most troubling to Laugier might have been its potential to confuse the proper understanding of the architectural object. In the rational organization of its structure, scaffolding obeys many of architecture’s first principles. Further, scaffolding only appears when the architecture it serves is in a compromised state—increasing the potential for the latter to be usurped by the former. Perhaps, in its tendency to materialize

suddenly, appear to be something that it isnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t, underscore the limits of its effects, prompt only temporary curiosity, and then eventually be dismantled in favor of a subsequent construction, scaffolding distressingly embodies architectureâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s inherent tenuousness more truthfully than anything else. In so doing, it reveals an uncomfortable secret that the architectural discipline otherwise takes pains to obscure, one that is anxiously concealed by the artfulness with which its works and their supporting narratives and histories are constructed: architecture is fundamentally unstable.

Of course, such anxiety is characteristic of the architectural disciplineâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;which is unique in being burdened by the need to both assert the infallibility and defend the lineage of its disciplinary knowledge, and also to recognize that such knowledge is fluid, recursive, and debatable. While this paradoxical condition might, on the face of it, seem tragic, it can also be understood as one of the architectural disciplineâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s greatest virtues. Its ability to appear certain and

inevitable lends power and relevance to its works. Meanwhile, its ability to interrogate, challenge, and redefine the very principles upon which this work is based affords it a flexibility to engage the manifold and evolving aspects of realityâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;social, cultural, technological, political, and others. This allows it to reformulate those aspects into new representations of the world, which virtualize the possibility of new experiences and settings for the rich and varied unfolding of human life.

Accordingly, the following pages feature glimpses of 19 thesis projects, as well as other discursive images, that seek to expand the range of architectureâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s concerns and its possible performances. As We May Think leverages architectureâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s inherent instability in order to stimulate the architectural imaginaryâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;opening up new ways of thinking about architecture and its possible engagements with the world.

2 Foreword 8 As We May Think...

34 New Normal 1: T ime 36 Welcome to Studiotopia!

98 New Normal 2: Manner(s)

100 Recently Discovered Outtakes from Les Diners de Gala

174 Electric Sheep + Commutated Space

204 Strange(r)ness

10 Lena Vogler Out of Bounds

22 Logan Kozlik E Pluribus Unum

38 Nicole Sarwono Idiosyntopias

46 Levi Schmitt Anima-tor 58 Vardan Asatryan Interbeing

68 Riley Eum Dead Spaces

76 Luany Leone Posthuman Morphologies

88 Navaya Vishnoi No Oikos for the Cyborg 104 Tess Stilman Decentered Dwelling

114 Minh Hong A Smelly, Vibrating, and Haptic Experience

122 Leo Cailles In Face of the Absurd 130 Ethan Scofield Patinaecene

140 Maya Mashiach A Mobile Sector of Global and Infrastructural Space

148 Natalie Wanjek Whatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Your Habit?

158 Ben Wassink Five Ring Filter

166 Yuran Liu To Fold a City: Folding Beijing

178 Miri Taple Hodgepodge 188 Kanata Yamayoshi Drifters

196 Brianna DeLeon Cosas Raras

As We May Think

1. The exhibition launched on our studio website, www.jackson-studio.com, and will be available on that site at least through September, 2020. 2. Vannevar Bush, “As We May Think,” Atlantic Monthly, July, 1945, 101-108. In this essay, Dr. Bush extrapolated forward from the photographic and computing technologies of his time to speculate about future technologies for knowledge acquisition, retrieval, and sharing. For Bush, such technologies would enable what he termed a memex—a flattened, nonhierarchical network of information contained within a device that could be accessed along a multitude of trajectories according to the preferences of the reader. The memex allowed the reader to curate information as desired, and also to save their preferences. Such a concept presaged, and was influential to pioneers of, the subsequent technologies of the Information Age, such as the internet. The As We May Think exhibition space could, in many ways, be considered a spatial representation of a memex for the ideas of this year’s thesis studio.

In addition to the title of this publication, As We May Think is also the name of the 2019–2020 Jackson Studio’s final exhibition, launched online on May 27, 2020.1 Since California’s shelter-inplace mandate, initiated in response to the Covid-19 pandemic, required the final quarter of this academic year to occur entirely online—through various web-based means such as Zoom meetings, Conceptboard pin-ups, and exhibitions through websites and Instagram—the studio elected to borrow its exhibition title from a seminal text from 1945 connected with the very first speculations about the internet.2 However, in intentionally remaining silent about the narrow origin of the title, the studio emphasized instead its broader ability to connote a paradigm-shifting transformation in thought. This was leveraged to provide a framework for the work on display: 19 undergraduate architectural thesis projects that each pursued a unique critical inquiry into new possibilities for architecture—demonstrating the potential for architecture to meaningfully intervene within the world, and to create unprecedented and transformative experiences. The exhibition was conceived of as a series of individual websites featuring the students’ thesis projects, each accessed from a primary interactive environment that was more suggestive of

the collective “headspace” of the studio. Whereas the individual websites presenting the students’ thesis research and design work were clear and polemical, the collective space was more discursive and ambiguous. Visually, this space appeared as a floating cloud of objects—ranging from easily identifiable mundane objects, loosely suggestive of the various domestic spaces that each member of the studio was now sequestered in, to objects that were more enigmatic and obscure, and representative of concepts associated with each student’s thesis. Using a mouse and control keys, visitors to this space could fly through it, leisurely exploring its content. In time, one could discern unique territories corresponding to each student, as well as local affinities between neighboring territories—the latter often revealed through collaboratively designed content that revealed thematic or conceptual overlaps between students’ areas of research.

lazily within this space in order to produce emergent conditions, and spectral human figures that can be glimpsed flying in the distance, suggestive of other visitors, or perhaps of the obscure characters that populate a dream.

As this space was intended to evoke both the emergent nature of the diverse and evolving discourse within the studio, as well as the broader idea of virtualization that is inherent to architectural speculation, the studio employed the metaphor of dreaming as a framework for imagining and materializing these qualities. Accordingly, the exhibition space was designed as a dream-like environment—with a cloud of animated objects continually drifting

There are 19 such dreams. After visiting each, we must return to the cloud to access another. We must keep returning to the cloud, again and again—which is now revealed as the evolving space of the architectural imaginary. This space is a space that is continually renewed, inchoate and emergent, affording a proliferation of readings, and giving rise to a plurality of ways that we might think: of architecture, of humanity, and of the world.

Within this dream-like space 19 portals are distributed, with illuminated interiors that beckon visitors to fly through them—each leading to a website presenting one of the individual thesis projects developed within the studio. With a flash of white light, one passes from the collective dream-space of the studio into...another dream. However, this dream—the dream of an individual thesis student, and future member of the architectural discipline—is a dream that imagines a transformation of the waking world, stoking the desire and disclosing the means for its possible realization.

“Play is a basic existential phenomenon, just as primordial and autonomous as death, love, work and struggle for power, but it is not bound to these phenomena in a common ultimate purpose. Play, so to speak, confronts them all – it absorbs them by representing them. We play at being serious, we play truth, we play reality, we play work and struggle, we play love and death – and we even play play itself.”01

– Eugen Fink

01_Fink, Eugen. “The Oasis of Happiness: Toward an Ontology of Play.” Yale University Press, 1968.

Site plan for the intervention at the Israeli-Palestinian border. The proposed project disrupts the existing border wall, creating a new entangled space that gives equal access to both groups of people.

_05_2020

_LENA VOGLER

_OUT OF

BOUNDS

Guy Debord, one of the leaders of The Situationist movement, helped develop the concept of the dĂŠrive, which is an alternative way of occupying the city that privileges curiosity, desire, and spontaneity over prescriptive form.

Photo, Guy Debord: https://www.humanite. fr/guy-debord-livressesituationniste-595571

Giorgio Agamben discusses the idea of the apparatus, which he defines as anything that has the capacity to capture, orient, and control the behaviors and opinions of living beings.02 These opinions and beliefs can often be divisive, which has been manifested in our current dysfunctional social and political climate. While contemporary discourse around the apparatus typically focuses on social media, architecture is an apparatus as well, since it has the capacity to orient our behavior. Every culture has a mode of existence within which the norms of reality can be temporarily called into question. Often referred to as play â&#x20AC;&#x201C; this mode must be understood as not something simply in opposition to labor but rather as a temporal space of existence that allows every aspect of life to be reimagined, and for new realities to be enacted.

These ideas carried such political power that they became the basis for entire political and architectural movements â&#x20AC;&#x201C; such as the work of the Situationists, and the research of Cedric Price, Bernard Tschumi, and Rem Koolhaas.

As an area of conflict between absolute and irreconcilable cultural realities, the Israeli border is the ideal site to explore the ability for play to allow for the enacting of individual human desires. The border wall itself is an apparatus – and while walls typically afford spatial division, by reconfiguring the apparatus of the wall it can instead afford intrigue, curiosity and desire by manipulating the space to neutralize pre-existing cultural preconceptions, habits, and practices.

The Israeli Border Wall stretches nearly 500 miles, annexing land that was determined neutral in the 1949 Armistice.

02_Agamben, Giorgio. What Is an Apparatus?: and Other Essays. Friendship as a Form of Life, 2010.

_LENA VOGLER

_05_2020

Photo courtesy of Luca Locatelli, New York Times, “We are All Orphans Here”

_OUT OF

BOUNDS

...subverting the poche of the wall to afford

intrigue, curiosity and desire rather than division and isolation... Giambattista Nolli’s Pianta Grande di Roma illustrates the clear definition of public and private space within the medieval city.

_POCHE Poche is identified as the opaque sections of architectural plans; the use of poche to represent the wall signifies that the wall thickness is not to be considered as part of the architectural space. Rather, a wall shown as poched is understood as an absolute boundary between discrete architectural spaces. While, historically, the manipulation of the poche was integral to the construction and represenation of masonry archiecture, the modern wall is rarely as dense as the poche implies. It has become a stylistic representation of the division of space and boundary within a project. Rem Koolhaas did an early study of the wall; “as an object the wall was unimpressive, evolving toward a near dematerialization; but that left its power undiminished. The wall was not an object but an Photo courtesy of Luca Locatelli, New York Times, “We are All Orphans Here”

exit.” It is an interactive architecture, morphing to categorize those who move through it. “As a prototype of bio-political architecture, maybe in its purest form, the border becomes more or less porous depending on the nation it belongs to.”04 Establishing this border signifies a division of power and a distinct inequality of people on either side of the barrier. Architecture is both the cause and solution to this divisive mentality. Manipulating the poche of the wall to accomodate virtualized experiences which subvert the typical understanding of the wall is one application of a larger argument The reinforced concrete wall serves as a barricade, that, through the manifestation of these new realities, architecture is able to make cultural “a machine that tears apart everything that crosses it, both objects and people, into separate, differences between people irrelevant through the collective creation of new, shared experiences. classifiable elements, only to put them back together again, in one way or another, when they erasure. … It was a warning that – in architecture – absence would always win in a contest with presence…in its ‘primitive’ stage the wall is decision, applied with absolute architectural minimalism.”03 In Koolhaas’ case, he uses the negative aspects of the wall, “division, isolation, inequality, aggression, destruction…ingredients for a new phenomenon: architectural warfare against undesirable conditions.”03 The Exodus project proposal sought to present confined space as a series of new, extraordinary experiences.

04_Hilal, Sandi, et al. Permanent Temporariness. NYUAD Art Gallery, 2018.

_LENA VOGLER

_05_2020

03_Böck,Ingrid. Six Canonical Projects by Rem Koolhaas.

_OUT OF

BOUNDS

In Rudolph Laban’s Labanotation, as well as Bernard Tschumi’s Manhattan Transcripts, movement is analyzed and described beyond typical architectural representation. This requires individuals to interpret abstract notation to determine their movement – acknowledging such movement as a performance. Similarly, these diagrams examine a boundary condition, and describe different techniques which allow this condition to afford new possible performances beyond mere division.

This thesis proposes a series of spaces designed to encourage non-normative interpretations of one’s environment. These thirdspace realities gradually breach the boundary condition and introduce an environment in which events take on the role of mediator, thus demonstrating the ability for architecture to foster a space where differences between users become inconsequential in the cocreation of an alternate reality.

In the same way that clothing has equal power to mask the person beneath it as it does to create intrigue, walls can also invite opportunity for discovery. Performance spaces inhabit the boundary line, offering an opportunity for both Israeli and Palestinian people to occupy the border equally, as well as to interact through conditions outside of the politically charged environment within which they normally encounter one another.

Right Photo: Magnhild Kennedy

_LENA VOGLER

_05_2020

Left Photo: Bassem Elkelesh

_OUT OF

BOUNDS

Specific light-wells within the project allow individuals from either side to interact with one another without direct conflict. This indirect interaction through light and shadow transforms individuals into actors who perform their actions free of the cultural codes and inhibitions that might otherwise inhibt them. This performance results in the virtualization of a new interactive space â&#x20AC;&#x201C; as a temporary proxy for the future realization of a shared cultural space within which both cultures live together.

Though the project envisions a future where both sides interact peacefully â&#x20AC;&#x201C; without the need for even its existenace â&#x20AC;&#x201C; the currently unstable conditions are reflected in the tectonic assembly of the project. Accordingly, it exhibits a plurality of structural and material details and connections, which are intentionally irregular and unsystematic in order to represent the provisionality and uncertainty of the spaces it affords.

_05_2020

_LENA VOGLER

lpla The loveseat came to fruition in the early 17th century when the large hoop skirts in style for women’s dresses created the need for a slightly wider chair. Over time the skirts slimmed down but the chairs stayed the same, allowing suitors just enough space to sit next to their suit-ees in an acceptable form of PDA. The official title of “loveseat” was given in reaction to this, but the term is now a misnomer for a piece of furniture that no longer serves a real purpose – the romance of the object is gone.

In my thesis I discuss the potential for space to generate conversation between people. What is formally intriguing about the loveseat is that, in the privacy of the home, it often opens itself to becoming a forum for discussion. While we typically associate the forum with the grand

square marketplace, the loveseat possess many of the same characteristics. The first forums served as a public arena where social, religious, political and commercial activities occurred; at a much smaller scale the couch creates the same space to express one’s opinions during social events. However, the formal manifestation of this piece of furniture itself does not invite conversation.

Early on in his theory of affordances, James Gibson discusses the properties of a surface that “affords support.” For the human species the surface must be “nearly horizontal, nearly flat, sufficiently extended, and rigid.”1 None of these directly offer sitting or standing but the properties suggest the activity. Applying this principal

ROL ay to a larger architectural landscape could afford people the opportunity to interpret their environment based off its physical suggestions. A surface could equally suggest sitting as it could suggest climbing, walking, running, skating â&#x20AC;&#x201C; it just needs to allow people to interpret it as such so that the cultivation of new activities occurs.

Gibson, James J. The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. Psychology Press, 2015.

_LENA VOGLER

_05_2020

James Gibsonâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s theory of affordances was implemented in my Vellum submittal to encourage multiple uses of the loveseat. The piece does not just afford sitting, but instead asks the user to creatively interpret how the various elements could be deployed into various ergonomic topographies. The creative openness regarding the character and qualities of the seat, which puts these qualities into play,

asks the user to be the performer or player of an independently interpreted act of lounging. The piece subsequently makes the user aware of the multiplicity of ergonomic performances inherent to the loveseat, which most furniture obscures by only affording culturally predetermined ways of sitting.

E PLURIBUS UNUM MONUMENTALITY AND BOTTOM-UP TRUTH IN ARCHITECTURE

LOGAN KOZLIK

ABSTRACT As humans began to make structures that could outlast their mortality, the content of what was left behind became relevant. Monuments have become grand tools of humanity and their value to society is practically incontestable. Monuments have the power of communication and gathering. They are important to people as a dissemination tool and as a totem capable of unifying society. Discourse around Architecture and Monuments have long been intertwined and even contemporary architectural discourse shares many similarities with the qualifications of monumentality. However, the increasing social, cultural, and ideological diversification that has arisen throughout the course of modernity suggests that a shift in the monumental paradigm is needed. Monuments have the ability to convey messages and the content of the message matters. With a greater understanding of a heterogeneous â&#x20AC;&#x153;publicâ&#x20AC;? and the perception of objects, monuments have the capacity to do more. Unlike the historical model of monuments, which was to perpetuate a singular truth from a position of power, the role of the contemporary monument should be to disseminate the diversity of multiple truths that comprise society. Architecture plays a unique role in how these types of information exchanges occur and it has an ability to remind the user of the presence of this multiplicity.

“ E p l u r i bu s u nu m ” (Out of many, one)

-de facto motto of the United States of America

1782-1956

monument at night – glowing transparency beginning to reveal that the main icon is not the sole piece of the monument

RESEARCH

engaging kinetic facade – Ned Kahn

multi-perspective view – Piranesi’s Imaginary Prisons

singular reading by photographic representation – Martin Luther King, Jr Memorial

In the past, Monuments were used to perpetuate a singular truth. This “truth” often would be presented by a hierarchical power like religion or the state. Monuments were sources of their information to promote a specific agenda. This informational strategy can be seen as an act of survival. By gathering people and using architectural strategies to perpetuate their singular, unyielding truth, regimes reinforce their ability to continue. The cultural powers are embedded in the monuments. Architectural symbolism or spatial cues help to physicalize their ideas. The extreme proportion of space compared to the human body in a Catholic church (monuments to religion) are used to convey omnipotent power. The one of the most common types of monumentality is the memorial: an object to commemorate the impact of something, most often the death of people. Historically, these often appear as realistic sculptures that resemble the human forms to whom they were dedicated. Sculptural monuments link a human story to non-human materials. The continuation of their physical body edifies the person’s impact on the world. These may have been productive in a pre-photography age. Simply seeing the person’s likeness may have effectively linked the viewer to the story of the person. However, in a contemporary society the mere reproduction of a person’s physical form may not achieve the gravitas that some believe that memorials can convey. There have been many installations or architectures that resist formal comprehension or ask the viewer to question their perceptions. The Cuboid Balloon by Junya Ishigami, constructed in the Museum of Contemporary Art in Tokyo, plays with the viewers perceptual experience. A giant, reflective balloon floats effortlessly in the gallery space. There are videos of people touching the gigantic balloon like it’s a child’s toy, tapping it around the room. In reality, the substructure of the balloon weighs over a ton and the balloon is filled with helium so that it achieves an equilibrium in the shared space with

reveals with proximities – “That’s no moon. It’s a space station.” From Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope

experiential value on the Nation Mall – Maya Lin’s Vietnam War Memorial

dualities of understanding – Junya Ishigami’s Cuboid Balloon

humans. There is a duality in its weight physical weight, but also its visual appearance. The balloon appears to be a solid, chrome mass. Yet, it is floating effortlessly right above you. In reality, the ‘mass’ is primarily empty. This special effect promotes a feeling of wonder. The impossibility in its construction and perceptual disconnect are issues that can be applied to this thesis. However, most visitors without the added information about how the balloon is constructed, most likely leave just in awe. Awe and wonder are valuable. Conflicting perceptions could produce the desired selfquestioning. In 1937, American Philosopher Lewis Mumford declared the “death of the monument.” He thought the concept of monumentalism had no use in modern society. He believed that monuments “stifle the possibilities of adaptation, movement and effective improvement.” He is suggesting that monuments are too solid and, if used in our situation, possibly restrict development of the future. The time we are living in is fundamentally different than the age where historical monuments were useful. He notes that humanity is no longer primarily concerned with mortality. “Instead of being oriented toward death and fixity, we are oriented toward life and change.” Mere existence is no longer a problem of humanity. We accept change and strive for “life.” Technology and globalization have already projected society into the future. Another part of modernity, as hinted at previously, is the rejection of the antiquated term, “public.” Historic monuments, perhaps, spoke generally – to subvert a wide audience to best achieve the power’s goal. However, now it is accepted that reducing an entire population to a homogeneous “public” may be reductive. A visitor to a monument brings with them individualized preconceptions that alter their experience. This individualized reality should not be ignored.

DESIGN PROJECT

“MONOLITHIC” ICON & GROUND MA

ABSTRACT

Monuments have become grand tools of humanity and their value to practically incontestable. They have the power of communication and gathering important to people as a dissemination tool and as a totem capable of unifying s the past, Monuments were used to perpetuate a singular truth. This “truth” oft be presented by a hierarchical power like religion or state. Monuments were s their information to promote a specific agenda. By gathering people and using arc strategies to perpetuate their singular, unyielding truth, they reinforce their continue. Architectural symbolism or spatial cues help to physicalize their ideas. Th proportion of space compared to the human body in a catholic church (monu religion) are used to convey omnipotent power. However, the increasing social and ideological diversification that has arisen throughout the course of modernity that a shift in the monumental paradigm is needed. Monuments have the ability messages and the content of the message matters. With a greater understan heterogeneous “public” and the perception of objects, monuments have the capa more. Discourse around Architecture and Monuments have long been intertwin architecture and monuments share a similar desire to communicate ideas. In arc more broadly, the way things are put together has a designed impact on the vie impact is a result of the perceived information that most take away from a b Additionally, architecture and monuments share similar aspirations of excep eliciting questioning and wonder. However in 1937, American Philosopher Lewis declared the “death of the monument.” He thought the concept of monumentalis use in modern society. Technology and globalization have already projected societ future. Another part of modernity is the rejection of the antiquated term, “public. to a monument brings with them individualized preconceptions that alter their ex This individualized reality should not be ignored.

A monument on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. is proposed where micro-narratives are prioritized over national, regional, and institutional narratives. People hear from people. Individuals may input their own stories and have them played back; or perhaps, the monument also pulls stories from online sources like Twitter and YouTube. This monument is a place where micro-narratives are recorded, stored, and reproduced. Digital sources are now where society seeks truths. Physicalization of this digital space has the capacity to be a productive monument: one that shows that the user’s reality is dependent on their limited perception. Reveals with proximity, doubt, shifts in horizon, circulation, non-destinations, and subversion of programmatic expectations are architectural techniques that can be used to achieve this type of realization. The monument is now a below-grade network with experiential value. DESIGN PROJECT

A monument on the National Mall in D.C is proposed where microna prioritized over national, regional, and institutional narratives. People hear from may be places where individuals input their own stories and have them played back the monument pulls from online sources like Twitter and YouTube. This monume where micronarratives are recorded, stored, and reproduced. Digital sources are society seeks truths. Physicalization of this digital space has the capacity to be a monument: one that shows that the user’s reality is dependent on their limited Reveals with proximity, doubt, shifts in horizon, circulation, non-destinations, and of programmatic expectations are architectural techniques that can be used to type of realization. The monument is now a below-grade network with experientia

HISTORIC MODEL- POSITIONS OF POWER

NEW MODEL-RECURSIVE MICRONARR

THESIS STATEMENT

Unlike the historical model of monuments, which was t

diversity of multiple truths that comprise society. Architec the user of the presence of this multiplicity.

SUBTERRANEAN MEZZANINE- formal/s

the icon can look solid and reflective while also seeming transparent and nonexistent – thus the perception of the monument may change according to, and therefore privileges, the individual subjectivity of each viewer

MODERNIST ICON

transition SUBTERRANEAN NETWORK

formal organization

SUBTERRANEAN NETWORK

PLURIBUS UNUM FUTURE MONUMENTALITY AND BOTTOM-UP TRUTH IN ARCHITECTURE

SITE

NATIONAL MALL- project site

ANIPULATION- viewers may enter the monument without realizing it

map from National park service

society is g. They are society. In ten would sources of chitectural ability to he extreme uments to l, cultural, y suggests to convey nding of a acity to do

ned. Both chitecture ewer. This built work. ptionality: Mumford sm had no ty into the .” A visitor xperience.

stainless steel ring composite- chain-metal fabric- box appears monolithic from a distance

embedded speakers tell curated stories to passer-byers

other visitor’s silhouettes visible only from stairs

meandering ramp system atop box trusses

transitionSEQUENCEfrom iconfrom tosolid underground ENTRANCE object to formalnetwork vaugeness

REFLECTIVE, MOVING, TRANSLUCENT SKIN- reveals with kinetic facade proximity did yo ... you deci u feel when ded to me?... have

arratives are people. This k; or perhaps, ent is a place e now where a productive d perception. d subversion achieve this al value. ...painthat’s grief, of the a gift... also

RHYZOMATIC ROOT SYSTEM- adjacent program spaces- manipulation of ground plane for entry and light

ENTRANCE SEQUENCE- from ‘monumental’ stairs, down escalator into transition zone

RATIVES

to perpetuate a singular truth from a position of power, the role of the monument is to disseminate the

... I

cture plays a unique role in how these types of information exchanges occur and it has an ability to remind

ser

feel much clo to her...

...we estimate to be trillions of galaxies out there...

NATURAL HISTORY MUSEUM

AMERICAN HISTORY MUSEUM

AFRCIAN AMERICAN HISTORY MUSEUM

PROGRAMSUBTERRANEAN NETWORK STORYCORPS INTERVIEW STATION STORYCORPS OFFICES EVENT ROOM

WASHINGTON MONUMENT

ROTATING GALLERY LOUNGE

NATIONAL MALL

CAFE TRAVELATOR

llow US off bright ye ...they kick lled e sergeant ca th d An . gs mail ba my name...

...the bravest of us tely absolu right now is d... terrifie

US DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE

FREER GALLERY

USDA

U.S. HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL MUSEUM

FLORAL PARK TIDAL BASIN

spatial/structural transition (modern icon to root system)

US POSTAL SERVICE

US DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE (SOUTH)

SUBTERRANEAN PLAN- rhyzomatic network

stainless steel ‘chain mail’ skin with integrated audio speakers reproduces curated stories to tell to passersby BUREAU OF ENGRAVING AND PRINTING

MODERNIST ICON

listening of stories (multiplicity of truths)

transition

larger gathering recording of stories

listening of stories (multiplicity of truths)

SUBTERRANEAN NETWORK

recording of stories

larger gathering SUBTERRANEAN NETWORK

recording of stories

general program organization

n how these types of information exchanges occur and it has an ability to remind

NATURAL HISTORY MUSEUM

AMERICAN HISTORY MUSEUM

AFRCIAN AMERICAN HISTORY MUSEUM

PROGRAMSUBTERRANEAN NETWORK STORYCORPS INTERVIEW STATION STORYCORPS OFFICES EVENT ROOM

WASHINGTON MONUMENT

ROTATING GALLERY LOUNGE

NATIONAL MALL

CAFE TRAVELATOR

US DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE

FREER GALLERY

USDA

U.S. HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL MUSEUM

FLORAL PARK

structural transition from modernist icon to nsition (modern icon to rootroot system) subterranean system

TIDAL BASIN

subterranean network â&#x20AC;&#x201C; plan SUBTERRANEAN PLAN- rhyzomatic network BUREAU OF ENGRAVING AND PRINTING

MODERNIST ICON

ories of

listening of stories (multiplicity of truths)

transition

hering SUBTERRANEAN NETWORK

recording of stories

larger gathering SUBTERRANEAN NETWORK

recording of stories

general program organization

monumental stairs lead up to circulation that submerges below grade

US POSTAL SERVICE

rhyzomatic network

US DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE (SOUTH)

root system permeates out from icon, slowly disrupting mundane National Mall plane

root system section

An individual coming to this project may see the modernist, solid icon from afar, but as one approaches, their perception of the object may change. After stepping up the monumental steps, a viewer is unexpectedly led down into the transition zone: where the modernist purity mingles with the subterranean root system, and where stories are recorded. The experience of this project may also happen in an opposite fashion: one may slip into a root system without even realizing it. The monument is not a encapsulated object but a dispersed network.

subterranean mezzanine transition zone from icon to root system

MODERNIST ICON

transition SUBTERRANEAN NETWORK SUBTERRANEAN NETWORK

MODERNIST ICON

transition SUBTERRANEAN NETWORK recording of stories SUBTERRANEAN NETWORK recording of stories

listening of stories listening of stories (multiplicity of (multiplicity of truths) truths)

larger gathering larger gathering recording of stories recording of stories

diagrammatic organization

monument at night â&#x20AC;&#x201C; glowing transparency beginning to reveal that the main icon is not the sole piece of the monument

RECON FIGU RE furniture investigation Logan Kozlik

infinite adjustability

scaled to human body

The goal of the Vellum furniture piece is to create a three dimensional object that has no truth. No one reality or experience is correct. Every time a individual has an experience with it, there is a capacity for the object to be altered and even to be different than the previous experience. Expectations and experience are subverted. Vagueness and doubt are achieved through its ever-changing formal configuration and infinite adjustability. The piece is comprised of 6 jointed pieces that hold varied, upholstered pads. Every joint is a friction connection, theatrically tightened and loosened by the individual to change the position and angle of the arms. If three different people encounter this piece at different times and manipulate it, the result of their adjustments would produce a three very different configurations. This limitless configuration represents the untruth of the object. At the most basic level of adjustability, individuals can adjust the pads to match their own body geometry. Perhaps one example is that the individual is uncomfortable in the position it was found and they can imagine how to make minor adjustments to the object to be more comfortable. This Vellum piece also asks the individual to question their own understanding, and to consider how they want to sit/lay/exist by presenting an innumerable quantity of options. There are incomprehensibly many configurations due to the amount of adjustability. The act of finding the object in a formation that the individual is unfamiliar with is possibly a more important interaction. One could question the “truth” of the object, and of the last person who utilized it – perhaps wondering how they used the object. Does the formation tell something about the previous people? About their body geometry or their perception? Perhaps the formation is so far out of the individual’s reality of understanding that this is seen as a tabula rasa, or a clean slate to start whatever manipulation the new individual wants. Or possibly the new individual will attempt to fit their own body (and their perceptual reality along with it) into the existing form: forcing a novel experience for the new individual. They may like it or they may not. But the information presented, is not a single truth. Formations are temporal and user dependent: dependent on previous users, and also on the preconceptions of the current user.

friction joint loosened/tightened by steel knob

upholstered adjustable pads

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IDIOSYNTOPIAS

NICOLE SARWONO

This thesis focuses on the social and cultural issue of normalized behavior and subjectivity that is reinforced through current architectural spaces and imagined utopias. It presents an alternative to social constructs of ‘utopia’ through an argument for ‘idiosyntopias.’ Arguing from the angle of virtuality, this thesis critiques architectural models that prioritize singular virtualities—exemplified in centuries of imagined and reimagined utopias, many of which seek impose specific societal ideals and behaviors. An examination can be made of these various utopian representations from the standpoint of the particular subjectivities that they imply, specifically, how limited and non-diverse those subjects are. From the Futurama exhibition at the 1939 World’s Fair to the technological optimism and Space Age ideals represented in Googie architecture and the subsequent development of various studies of space stations such as the Stanford Torus, the designs of these architectural utopias emphasize existing notions of utopia and a narrow view of societal normalcy and values. In contrast to such utopias, idiosyntopias are defined by architectural strategies of incompleteness, excessiveness, and imperfection—which prioritize individuals’ unique and creative interpretation of space. Incompleteness refers to a deficit of information leaving room for interpretation, excessiveness refers to too much information that allows for a multiplicity of readings, and imperfection refers to a conflict of information resulting in incongruous readings that must be negotiated. This thesis project is located between two unspecified office buildings, which act as a visual and spatial foil to an idiosyntopic space of leisure and creative appropriation. It presents a series of mixed-use spaces, designed with incompleteness, excessiveness, and imperfection, that can be idiosyncratically interpreted to be used for performances, lectures, dancing, eating, parks space, leisure or recreation. It serves as an urban scale example of architectural strategies for idiosyntopias applied in various programmatic conditions.

IDIOS [ONE’S OWN] + SYN [TOGETHER] + TOPO [PLACE]

Union 76 Station in Beverly Hills, from Architectural Digest, Beau Peregoy, 2016.

Theme Building LAX, from Architectural Digest, Beau Peregoy, 2016.

Interior of a Stanford torus, painted by Donald E. Davis

INCOMPLE EXCESSIV IMPERFEC SLEEK MODERN SKYSCRAPERS, INTERSECTING HIGHWAYS, SMOOTH AND CLEAN LINES THAT HAVE INSPIRED MOST “VISIONS” OF THE FUTURE FROM THE JETSONS TO THE SETS OF HOLLYWOOD MOVIES LIKE BLADERUNNER.

SOME USE DESIGN TECHNIQU

Futurama Balconies at the 1939 World’s Fair, New York.

gurrrrl I am so happy for you

AARGHH

Wait for me!

squish squish

AN IDIOSYNCRATIC APPROACH:

wanna bet?

hey not fair!

no way.

race ya

I’m sorry

idiots.

!!!

knees up everyone!

What a day

I love you.

I love you, more.

idiots. !?.

any questions?

hey man

architectural strategies for idiosyntopias

Henri Lefebvre describes in his Critique of Everyday Life that it is through the development of the conditions of human life—rather than abstract control of productive forces—that humans could reach a concrete utopian existence. While development of human life conditions spans numerous fields of study—economics, social studies, politics, etc.— architecture can reevaluate utopias as, rather, idiosyntopias to improve human life conditions. This can be done through designing for openness and otherness and a continual resistance to being

defined, categorized, or directed to a specific subject through ambiguity of formal and spatial qualities. The ambiguity of the architecture can be qualified by:

Chunk Model photos. Individual interpretation of space and programmatic adjacencies.

SECTION STUDIES:

Chunk Study Models. Geometry implying multiple readings and behaviors.

DESIGN TECHNIQUES:

SURFACES

STOP OR GO

UNUSUAL OPENING

UNCLEAR PATH

SIMILAR BUT DIFFERENT

NEW PROPORTIONS

PLAYING WITH LEVELS

REUSE OF KNOWN ELEMENTS

ENCOURAGE DECISION MAKING AND INDIVIDUAL INTERPRETATIONS OF HOW TO BEHAVE IN SPACE

Detail Section. Spaces with multiple programmatic interpretations.

Longitudinal Section

Transverse Section

CHUNK SECTION:

POOLS

There are fish in some pools and not in others, establishing mixed interpretations of what that means for how to behave. The water from one pool flows to the bottom of the stair, suggesting the possible interpretation of walking into it, in addition to the possibility to walking past it or sitting on the ledge next to it. The width of the narrow end of the pool may cause conflict between those desiring to walk through it vs. sit on the ledge.

TANNING PATHS The â&#x20AC;&#x153;tanning bedsâ&#x20AC;? imply surfaces for laying and they the warp into paths of various materials. It is unclear what each material and pathway is suggestive of, and so users are able to make a decision on how to behave and how they interpret the blending of the laying surfaces with the path. They also serve as a placemaking tool for the whole area, implying activities such as yoga and stretching.

GRASSY TABLES

PATHS? TABLES? OR DIVISION OF SPACE?

Grassy park space blends into the table surfaces of a cafe setting. Individual interpretation of these material differences and suggestions of surface height provide opportunities for individuals to feel enfranchised by making choices on how to perform in the space.

Pathways can be used to travel along while also dividing space, but they are placed at heights that could be interpreted as tables. One could choose to cross over between the spaces over the paths, go along the paths, or use them as surfaces to eat or work on. These are suggestive, but open to different interpretations.

PAREIDOLIA [parr-i-DOH-lee-É&#x2122;]

INCOMPLETENESS through

PAREIDOLIA

between the real and virtual, familiar and unknown This furniture study serves as a bridge between the real and virtual. It is an experiment of a possibility of formal qualities that allow users to enter virtual space, engaging imagination and alternate possible realities. [Virtual space refers to the space of illusion that a representational object or architecture brings the mind to.] The experiment consists of draping material over a variety of medium-sized â&#x20AC;&#x153;everydayâ&#x20AC;? objects to imply complexity in geometry that can be interpreted differently among individuals. The objects are dismantled, rearranged, and wrapped loosely to create a variety of spaces for the human body to interact with it. Overlaying fragments of known objects establishes an unknown condition open to interpretation among individuals. There are variations of blended surfaces overlaying the objects that appeal to the body, and a variation of body-object interactions. The technique of using objects as a base for the geometry creates a flexible [multiuse], indeterminate [vague], and disruptive [unusual] spatial condition that triggers variable effects within individuals that encourages access of the unknown.

VARIOUS INTERPRETATIONS DEPENDENT ON INDIVIDUAL SUBJECTIVITIES

ANIMA-TOR EFFECTIVELY INEFFICIENT LEVI SCHMITT

1.01

circulation towards encouraging user agency and encounter

1.01: Design Experiment. Channeling movement by liquid intervention. 2.01: Anima-tor. Axonometric overview render of the entry space.

2.01

3.01

field play: understanding the built environment physically 4.02

3.01: Documentation of Hysteresis vol. 12, dohysteresis, YouTube. 4.01: Evans, Robin, Translation from Drawing to Building and Other Essays - Figures, Doors and Passages (MIT Press, 1997) 88. 4.02: Picture Collage of the area surrounding proposed subway entrance Shibuya, Tokyo. Google Maps.

abstract As human interaction is changing form, increasingly becoming based in a secondary non-physical reality, public spaces offered by cities have continued to follow Modernismâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s emphasis on efficiency and security, often leaving a basis of natural human desires unconsidered. This monotonous public environment results in an unfulfilled gap of human desire and collective achievement, not only endangering established democracy, but also humanityâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s collective future. With a growing population, scarcity of natural resources, densification of cities, expansion of digital technology and a largely unrestrained, instantaneous information transfer across large distances, the world as it is known today is becoming more interconnected and mentally disengaged in the same stroke. Irrelevant of location, time or distance a large majority of the human population can connect with one another in an immediate but mediated manner. Information initially taking time to transfer can now be shared instantaneously, by whomever possesses a device with access to the internet. While the internet aids us in connectivity across great distances, it underplays the importance of interpersonal interaction in the established social life of the city. As discussed by Robin Evans, the modern strive for comfort, and reduction of social unpleasantries, enlists architecture as a preventative measure of security and segregation, resulting in a limitation of the horizon of experience. [4.01] Removing this physical interaction between parties of different backgrounds and beliefs leads to a personal and individual disconnect and misunderstanding of circumstance of the other. Ideally, the public mixing space offers the discomfort, unexpected and unique information about oneâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s neighbors which the secondary reality of the internet

cannot. However, exchanges between different social groups, financial standings and opposing opinions have become more restricted, as these initially uncomfortable circumstances can be easily avoided. This thesis will therefore demonstrate architectural techniques for encouraging social and spatial curiosity, wonder, intrigue, and engagement. Using a redesigned subway station in Tokyo as a case study, it will show how architecture can disturb the established restrictive monotony and regularity of public space, and purposely create a physical space that allows unexpected circumstances, leading to a collective response in movement and action. It will do so through the development of pleasurable spaces of personal reflection and interpersonal interaction, situated in places of transitory movement, previously regarded as areas of strict activity and high efficiency. The result challenges the daily routine, thereby rebalancing the human condition of interaction, curiosity and, most importantly, wonder.

p s yc h o p e r fo r m o n a n ce A psychological performance of the individual through reasonance created by bodily movement, linking the mind with oneâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s physical state of being.

auditory responses to physical movement

8.01: Design Experiment. Collage representing platforms and interiors. Dirt-cast concrete, aluminum tube.

8.01

terrain room encounter detail changing atmospheric events to encourage user agency

e n t r y s p a ce Entrance from street level onto metal grating walkways

walkway level -1

Differentiated pathes and uncertain circulation eventually lead to tunnel entrances

walkway level -2

Long and winding tunnels with tilted walls lead to the terrain room

walkway level -3

Structural support between entry space and terrain room

concrete waffle structural support

Here is a view into the main north entrance of Interbeing Street. Multiple activities are taking place simultaneously, both those that are programmed and those that are spontaneous. Constructed and natural elements coexist harmoniously. People are engaged in their environment and with one another.

THESIS STATEMENT Due to its origins in industrial production, and its privileging of the efficient flow of goods and people in service to that production, the spatial and organizational nature of the modern city, and most of the architecture within it, inhibits human connection to oneself, to others, and to the wider surrounding context. If the spaces we occupy and dwell in, and the patterns of life they give birth to, detach us from the awareness of the present moment and the relationship of life, they discourage the authentic human condition of responsiveness that allows one to establish trust and be open to the world, and, in turn, to create new and desirable experiences through the dual condition of enriching and allowing oneself to be enriched by the world. This thesis will instead propose an architectural environment which opens the heart to the present, allowing connection to ourselves, to others, and to nature as a whole.

T E

Here is a view into an interior space on the third floor, framing the main central neighborhood of Interbeing Street. Natural light is strategically employed by allowing sun rays to spread into hollowed out concrete spaces. Stairs unite levels across these concrete voids. Interior spaces such as these are spacious, allowing for multiple activities and freedom of movement.

Here is a view into the Northeastern neighborhood of Interbeing Street. This space unites the indoor and outdoor experience, creating a continuously engaging environment. Constructed and natural elements coexist harmoniously. People are engaged in their environment and with one another. It is a slow meandering space where mass elements frame usable space, allowing seating.

PROJECT DESCRIPTION

This thesis exemplifies these principles of Interbeing, demonstrated in a redesigned urban block in the city of Glendale, California. As nature is always changing, the architectural environment of Interbeing should be similarly lively and dynamic. Within certain fundamental organizational parameters, there should be flexibility for responsiveness to environmental conditions through customization, affording more desirable experiential conditions. This flexibility will provide the opportunity for an architecture of Interbeing to evolve to fit the natural mold of peopleâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s needs and remain a meaningful place in the city fabric. An architecture of Interbeing offers direct experience, a condition of â&#x20AC;&#x153;stage and performance,â&#x20AC;? spontaneity and variability, a change and centering of movement, a sense of nurturing, choice, engaging border conditions, a direct connection to nature and all in all, a symphony of rhythms in interplay.

Here is an overall perspective outline of Interbeing Street. Engaging constructed spaces divide the street into various interconnected neighborhoods that flow into one another. There is a multiplicity of circulation and activity choices, designed to create an environment that engages individuals, freeing them to be, and to express their being, as they wish to.

PRECEDENTS The New Glenstone exemplifies the merging of the built and the natural, which is a theme incorporated into this thesis project. There is a fundamental level of organization, but also material differentiation of surfaces within that organization.

The New Glenstone // Travilah, Maryland Thomas Phifer and Partners

The Barbican // London, England Chamberlin, Powell and Bon

The High Line // New York, USA Diller Scofidio + Renfro

The Barbican creates a variety of residential spaces interacting with one another, while also creating activated public space, offering a variety of uses to engage pedestrians, including intimate interaction with natural elements.

The High Line frames the city as the subject, offering amazing views of the city, while providing opportunities for social engagement, in addition to its more obvious function as a means of elevated pedestrian circulation. Natural elements merge with the built on this readapted railway, while seating at certain points creates â&#x20AC;&#x153;stage and performanceâ&#x20AC;? as the passersby and the seated people have an opportunity to engage one another.

The BIG 8 House creates a model where commercial and residential spaces are stacked on top of one another. This concept is known as the “walkable neighborhood” and it is incorporated into my project, where community programs, commercial programs, and residential programs can interact, creating interconnection opportunities within various uses.

Jean Renaudie’s housing project at Ivry-Sur-Seine exemplifies variety, choice, and surprise, offering various circulation routes. It creates a terraced structure, but one that is still differentiated. Natural elements also offer a healthy contrast to the concrete structure. This thesis project likewise creates more usable space within circulation space, within which new programs can arise.

8 House // Copenhagen, Denmark BIG

Ivry-Sur-Seine // Paris, France Jean Renaudie

The Moriyama House includes the outdoor space as part of the circulation and living experience of the project, where “rooms” are intentionally separated as individually enclosed spaces, so as to create meaningful outdoor space within them. The indoor and outdoor spaces merge as one holistic experience, and this is a concept incorporated into this thesis project. There is also a formal differentiation within a fundamental organization which is also reflected in this thesis project.

Moriyama House // Tokyo, Japan Ryue Nishizawa

MAIN NORTH CLUSTER PLANS

COMMUNITY

LOCAL BOOKSTORE

CAFE

The first floor of Interbeing Street is dedicated to spaces which bring the community together. These include local bookstores, cafes, art and sculpture classes, galleries, and other communal spaces. The arrangement of mass here allows for the pedestrian to walk through the cluster, across the courtyard, and toward other neighborhoods. It also ensures enough daylight in each of the perimeter programs. The first floor is the beginning of the terracing structure of the cluster.

COMMUNITY

COMMUNITY COMMUNITY

FLOOR PLAN I

COMMERCIAL COMMERCIAL

COMMERCIAL

The second floor is dedicated to commercial spaces like shops and restaurants. Relatively small units ensure that the scale of any space is not overwhelming. Human scale is a consideration throughout the project. The pop-outs allow for local congregation and uniquely adapted use of space, as pauses between flows of circulation. There is a visual connection from the spatial break on the western end through the eastern end of the project.

COMMERCIAL

N FLOOR PLAN II

RESIDENTIAL

RESIDENTIAL RESIDENTIAL

The third and top floor is dedicated to residential spaces. Combining communal, retail, and residential spaces in downtown Glendale creates more opportunity for engagement across programs and a more walkable and diverse neighborhood. Getting to the third floor requires passing through a private gate or using a designated elevator code. It follows the terraced popout formal language. It is a residential space quietly sitting atop the downtown activities, watching over it.

RESIDENTIAL

N FLOOR PLAN III

stage and performance

Bridge (cluster 1 to cluster 2)

mini skylights through concrete

SECTION DETAIL The section detail showcases an instance of the waterfall facade found on multiple clusters across the project. In order to create the waterfall, water is pumped from the interior to the edge of the cluster, released, then pumped back into the stream underground, which comes back around into the waterfall. It is one closed system, with the enclosure break at the waterfall, recycling a constant amount of water. The concept of being engaged in another person, while being the subject of engagement for a third party, is also shown here as â&#x20AC;&#x153;stage and performance.â&#x20AC;?

PLAN DETAIL This plan detail focuses on the bridge leading from the first main north cluster to the second. It follows the same popout formal language, allowing for pauses to slow down and watch, while being suspended between activity on all sides.

OVERALL VIEWS Below is an aerial perspective and plan of Interbeing Street in its surrounding context of Glendale, CA. Interbeing Street is an oasis of engagement catering to the densely populated city of Glendale, one that affords the residents an opportunity to slow down, intermingle, and connect within the heart of their city. The greenery of nature is embraced and preserved, while helping create a rich network of varying spaces flowing into one another, including an outdoor amphitheater, pools of water, libraries, cafes, shops, and residential apartmentsâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;the variety of activities which coexist in a lively city. The aerial plan of Interbeing Street clearly shows the various neighborhoods of spaces that are organized across the street and flow into one another in between the openings of constructed clusters. It also shows the prevalence of nature in an otherwise constructed city, framing this street as a natural oasis operating at a much slower pace and focusing more on connecting rather than simply moving people across the city.

DETAIL VIEW This detailed perspective of one of the main northern clusters highlights the circulation within the constructed spaces and their role in bridging pedestrians across different neighborhoods. As elsewhere in this thesis project, there are multiple circulation options that allow individuals to customize their movement through its variety of spaces. This affords individuals agency over their experience, and also solicits continual spatial curiosity that fosters increased social and spatial engagement. In addition, this circulation in generous in both its spatial dimensions as well as its ergonomic and programmatic affordances. This allows individuals to spontaneously develop new activities within these spaces, thereby transforming them into event spaces that engage other passersby. The image also shows the coexistence of natural and constructed elements, the occupation of different levels in the Interbeing landscape, and the visibility across these levels.

STIRFLY STIRFLY is a study of humanity’s inter-connected nature. Similar to human relationships, two people first need to collaborate in order to sit together on STIRFLY. Once they are on it, each person’s weight pulls on the other, creating a dynamic dance. When one individual goes down, the other is pulled upward; when that individual compensates by pushing downward, the first individual is pulled upward. This resembles the cyclical waves of two people in a relationship in time and space.

-14°

wave crest

-14°

0° 0°

equilibrium

+14° wave crest

+14°

assembly process Paracord Seating

Secondary Steel Frame top of seat structure

Secondary Steel Frame front of seat structure Secondary Steel Frame back of seat structure

Primary Steel Frame 1/4â&#x20AC;? thickness creates seat form

Sand for stability and re-centering of weight

Carbon Steel Wok 30 inch diameter 9 inch depth

final assembly

D E A D S PA C E S 죽은 공간들

In the near future of the South Korean peninsula, death arises as a rampant problem among the citizens. Although the need for design related to dying and death is rapidly increasing due to the prolongation of life, the architecture of death has been a continuously neglected aspect of the architectural discourse, especially in South Korea where architecture is more of a concept of real estate than design. The only places where the remains of the deceased can go in the narrow country are cubicle-like ossuaries. South Koreans have to stand in attention and align in straight rows even after death.

South Korea’s urban death facilities operate under an invisible cloak, with minimal exposure to the public and outside the boundaries of the living. As Seoul grew rapidly, the government marked the crematoriums and cemeteries that were in or near the city as “urban hate facilities” and kicked them out of the city or shut them down. The worlds of living and dead are strictly segregated in Seoul; death has become less of an aspect of everyday life, which only adds to the stigma surrounding death in Korean culture. The fear of death is leading people to face an unprepared and low quality death. Instead of pushing the space for the deceased to outside the boundaries of life, this thesis entangles it with the space of living. It investigates the potential of an architecture of death as a form of public space, exposing and reintegrating it into the center of Seoul. Dead Spaces presents a series of multi-sensorial fields to explore the process and byproducts of resomation—spaces that trigger human senses and provoke people’s emotions toward death.

The aperture full of exotic plants welcomes pedestrians in.

The outcome of the resomation process: nutritious water consisting of amino acids, salt, sugar and pepticide is used to nurture vegetations in the garden. As water gets delivered to the garden, its heat expands a large inflatable field where people can walk over and feel the warmth. Water gets filtered through the plants and released back to the Han River.

Hybridization of funerary architecture and public space that triggers human senses and provokes natural responses to death

The oddly shaped, non-enclosed rooms for the farewell ceremony create opportunities for the public to glimpse this private ritual. The rooms release olfactory triggers that take mourners to a particular moment or place that they share as a special memory with the deceased. After the ceremony, the body is lowered to the resomation machine below.

기 억 을 불 러 일 으 키 는

The chimneys puff out non-toxic hot air all day, stimulating the curiosity of passersby.

This area is where bodies are prepared for the farewell ceremony. They are washed for the last time by their loved ones in the bath house. When hot air from the resomation process meets cold air from outside, it triggers louvers to move, creating ever-changing beautiful light patterns. The curved exterior facade is used to capture stories of the deceased.

HUMANITY’S PERCEPTION OF REALITY IS CONTINGENT ON THE LIMITED PHENOMENA IT ENCOUNTERS AMID ITS FRIVOLOUS E X I S T E N C E W I T H I N A VA S T LY UNIVERSE. In order to cope with the uncanniness of reality and our precarious position within it, we tend to scale down the world and its phenomena into a comprehensive and anthropocentric framework of perception predicated on categorical thinking. Humanity’s confidence in its own knowledge-based perception of the world normalizes this anthropocentric mindset and obscures the complexity of reality. Aesthetics, however, is one of many alternative vehicles of human cognition that can transcend categorical perception and offer uncanny and non-anthropocentric vistas of reality. In contrast to its typical role as an agent of certainty and normativity, architecture’s world-building expertise could be leveraged to catalyze a useful sense of doubt and estrangement. Such a shift in architecture’s role from a practical device to that of an aesthetic lens would bring about unprecedented possibilities of occupiable form that would not only trigger a new aesthetic sensibility, but also recalibrate humanity’s conceptual framework. This thesis therefore investigates how the emergence of Post-Human spatial dislocations expressed through Trans-Categorical Morphologies could displace humanity’s anthropocentric reality in favor of a flat ontology that disrupts the relationships between familiar morphologies and their associated affordances. As demonstrated in the urban context of São Paulo, these spatial dislocations would violate architecture’s predictable structure and subject humanity to uncanny estranged

worlds that discredit our anthropocentric perception.

Architecture and Design’s timeless devotion to the human body perpetuates our anthropocentric tendency to reduce objects and spatial conditions to categorical and functional expectations. This emphasis on anthropomorphism, says Peter Eisenman, “leads to the perception of architecture as a practical device instead of something with ontological value.” Therefore, our tendency to evaluate architecture based on functional expectations rather than its ontological value

“highlights the invisibility of the majority of human experience.” Although architecture aims to optimize spatial conditions in favor of human activities, this effort NORMATIVE FURNITURE

actually results instead in overly-structured environments that dictate human activity. According to Eisenman, architecture’s common and valueless spaces fail to investigate because they tend to propagate precribed activities and affordances. As architecture becomes more focused on the static instead of the performative, humanity becomes more suseptible to passive habitation and inattentiveness towards everyday spaces and experiences.

“new possibilities of occupiable form”

NON-NORMATIVE POSITIONS & PHYSICAL INTERACTIONS

ERGONOMIC MULTIPLICITY & ESTRANGED AFFORDANCES

NON-NORMATIVE OCCUPIABLE FORM

NON-NORMATIVE MODES OF HABITATION AND PHYSICAL ENGAGEMENT BETWEEN USERS

VELLUM FURNITURE COMPETITION 2019 HONORABLE MENTION The Post-Human offers valuable alternate perceptions of reality which discredit humanity’s illusory authorative position. Knot For You is a furniture piece that manifests a Post-Human indifference to anthropocentric ergonomics and social conventions by blurring the legibility of its affordances and appropriate contingents. The holes and crevices of this estranged object subtly suggest that the user’s body should be inserted into it, but do not clearly indicate how, or by whom, it should be used. Although its formal qualities reveal some understanding of the human body, Knot For You’s ergonomic multiplicity and estranged affordances exhibit an indifference to human comfort as it invites users to explore different ways in which they can awkwardly knot their bodies into the object

along with other users.By encouraging non-normative modes of habitation and physical engagement between its multiple users, this Post-Human object is able to explore new possibilities of occupiable form that strain against accepted anthropocentric conventions, and allow humanity to transcend its inherently inhibited perception of reality.

LIFE BEFORE

THE THING...

“We “Welive liveon onaa PLACID ISLAND ininthe themidst midstofofaa OF IGNORANCE black blacksea seaofofinfinity. infinity.Piecing Piecingtogether together ofofdissociated dissociatedknowledge knowledgewill willopen openup up such suchterrifying terrifyingvistas vistasofofreality realityand andofof our ourfrightful frightfulposition positiontherein.” therein.” HH. .P. P. LLOOVVEECCRRAAFFTT –– TTHHEE CCAALLLL OOFF CCTTHHUULLHHUU

INVISIBILITY & COMPLACENCY

One of the most noticeable consequences of our anthropocentric mode of thinking is the evolution of architecture’s focus from individual buildings into mere manifestations of “how people operate in the context of reality.” This condition has caused humanity to inhabit an artificial physical reality that affirms its anthropocentric conceptual framework through predictable and reliable spatial experiences governed by pre-existing values and shared norms. As urban environments become more predictable, they transform into “ordinary accepted backgrounds” that minimize encounters with the unfamiliar and produce an artificial sense of security that inhibits humanity’s ability to perceive realities beyond its anthropocentric perception.

THE DAY IT

EMERGED...

THE GROTESQUE... GROTESQUE... THE is a structure of estrangement which PERVERTS,

TRANSGRESSES, AND DESTABILIZES

familiar conventions. This blurring of boundaries threatens our essential sense of humanity, and causes an uneasy sense of impotence and imminent catastrophe that prompts new intellectual and behavioral developments.

TRANSCATEGORICAL MORPHOLOGIES

????

Humanityâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s tendency to understand objects through a limited set of familiar categories produces an imperfect perception of reality and an artificial sense of clarity. TRANSCATEGORICAL MORPHOLOGIES arise when objects display qualities that disagree with their attributed categories. In the face of these estranged objects, our conventional categories of perception become porous, arbitrary and unreliable; as a result, these uncanny forms rob the mind of its ability perceive reality through familiar frameworks, and undermines the legitimacy of our anthropocentric reality.

AS IT

GREW...

“Instead “Insteadofoflocating locatingthe thePost-Anthropocene Post-Anthropoceneafter afterthe theAnthropocene Anthropocene along alongsome somedialectical dialecticaltimeline, timeline,ititisisbetter betterconceived conceivedas asaa

COMPOSITE PARASITE NESTED INSIDE THE HOST OF PRESENT TIME,, evolving and appearing in irregular intervals at a scale that evolving and appearing in irregular intervals at a scale that exceeds exceedsthe theEros/Thanatos Eros/Thanatoseconomy economyofofthe theorganism.” organism.” S O M E T R A C E E F F E C T S O F T H E P O S T- A N T H R O P O C E N E S O M E T R A C E E F F E C T S O F T H E P O S T- A N T H R O P O C E N E – B E N J A M I N B R AT T O N – B E N J A M I N B R AT T O N

THE END OF LIFE AS WE

KNOW IT...

In Aesthetics Equals Politics, Mark Foster Gage defines an Aesthetic Turn as:

“a recalibration of our very understanding of reality through an aesthetic lens.” Gage’s discussion stresses the value of aesthetic recalibration and how its political consequences could allow for the emergence of new understandings and new practices, rather than simply deconstructing existing ones. Redefining architecture as an aesthetic lens instead of a practical tool could “bring about a new understanding of objects, spaces and environments,” prompt “new forms of cultural engagement” and unveil nonanthropocentric frameworks of perception. Architect Tom Wiscombe discusses this aesthetic turn model as a new architecture that “destabilizes what we think architecture should look like by deliberately compromising, architecture’s own representational structure.” In order to accomplish the objectives of an aesthetic lens, architecture must de-center humanity by deliberately discrediting anthropocentric conventions and expectations. Most importantly, this new model should free humanity from the complacent and passive existence perpetuated by anthropocentric urban conditions by reactivating aesthetic sensibility, affording new unconventional behaviors, and prompting alternate perceptions of ontological reality that transcend our traditional categorical framework.

“Sites that constitute the Post-Anthropocene have nothing to do with our bodies; they are outside us, totally indifferent to us, where

WE ARE NO LONGER PART OF THE EQUATION AT ALL” . N N EE O O -- M MA AC CH H II N N EE :: A A RR C CH H II TT EE C C TT U U RR EE W W II TT H HO OU U TT PP EE O O PP LL EE –– LL II A AM M YY O OU UN NG G

LIFE WITH

THE THING...

The Post-Human aesthetic agenda does not aspire to make itself comprehensible through anthropocentric frameworks of perception. Instead, it spawns the emergence of an architecture that is more slippery and uncertain. Its fabric defies any sense of logic, disregards familiar conventions, and disrupts established patterns of behavior. When subjected to these unpredictable, unreliable and uncomfortable spatial perversions, humanity must adopt new forms of habitation and cultural engagement if it desires to coexist with this new reality. Ultimately, the anxieties arising from a de-centered relationship between humanity and its familiar environment incite intellectual reformation and afford access to alternate perceptions of reality.

A NEW

REALITY...

POST-HUMAN FRAMEWORKS...

Humanity cannot escape its artificial reality unless it develops an alternate, non-anthropocentric framework of perception. Encounters with the Post-Human, according to Benjamin Bratton, may “not only provide for new affordances...but can also reveal things that have been there all along, but which were difficult or impossible to perceive without them.” Exposure to the inescapable cosmic vulnerability of humanity manifests a flat ontology in which humans are acknowledged as mere objects among reality’s multiple constituents. This de-centering effect engages a valuable discussion on the possible consequences of our artificial anthropocentric frameworks by helping humanity to understand the roots of its categorical thinking and encourage new perceptions of reality.

nO oIKOS FOR The Anthropocene discourse is filled with theories of its advent—the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Industrial Revolution, modern agricultural practices— and all of these are researched and theorized with Anthropocentrism at their crux. Anthropocentrism and anthroponormativity are not innate human qualities, but are rather abstract frameworks that have been the topic of discourse for centuries. Although they are characteristics of humanity’s space within the world, they are only one of many possible representations of

reality. This thesis analyzes the basis of those theories more critically, thereby aligning itself with another theory that places the beginnings of Settler Colonialism in the 16th and 17th century as the anthropogenic interventions in the Earth’s geologic record that directly led to the capitalist systems of oppression that are the dominant forces governing the planet today. This theory criticizes the universality claim of the other theories by citing indigenous populations and other colonized communities that lived, and still live, in a de-centered

The Question of the Anthropocene Capitalocene Eurocene Plantationocene Petrocene Extractionocene Oppressionocene

द cYboRG state—as evidence that anthropocentric reality is in no way the planetary reality. Colonial practices led to the creation of binary identities and the separation of the “other” from the “standard.” Such othering has separated not only humans and non-humans, but has also resulted in essentialist categories within humans themselves, giving birth to racism, homophobia, transphobia, and other forms of discrimination. Othering is understood as a means of preserving human space and human technology, which is achieved through practices such as war, deforestation, and mining.

“In its brief tenure, the Anthropocene has metamorphosed. It has been taken up in the world, purposed, and put to work as a conceptual grab, materialist history, and cautionary tale of planetary predicament. Equally, this planetary analytic has failed to do the work to properly identify its own histories of colonial earth-writing, to name the masters of broken earths, and to redress the legacy of racialized subjects that geology leaves in its wake.” Kathryn Yussoff

navaya vishnoi

This thesis is, therefore, an attempt at queer world-making. It calls for a de-centering of the human subject. This de-centering requires a reimagination of everything that would have previously been encompassed in an oikos—a home—to begin with. Speculated in the aftermath of a global climatological crisis, this thesis creates a world where humans are scavengers. Focusing on the technological tools that the Capitalocene has used to preserve the standard anthropocentric space, this thesis queers the need for original instrumentality. The scavengers find these technological artifacts, but are deprived of the anthropocentric and anthroponormative narratives that defined their original instrumentality. This defamiliarization of technology would create a multitude of new narratives and subjectivities that would blur the boundaries between human and non-human, standard and the other. This would result in a flat ontology of consciousness that would reveal new ways of living.

queering technologies

Humanity has therefore, become uncanny in its current state of precarity. This precariousness has called into question the possibility of rectifying human technology to mitigate the effects it has caused. There is, therefore, a need to reimagine technology and the actions it affords. This means that instead of manipulating the environment to create artificial affordances, the scavengers diverse engineer the sophisticated technology of the Anthropocene to understand new affordances. These new readings of affordances would create new ways of existing and creating those would not be restrained by normative narratives. Anthroponormative actions have been shown to be entangled with the othered entities and forces of the planet, resulting in a climatological crisis where negative effects are temporally and spatially separated from their human causes, and therefore fall outside the human frame of reference. The technological tools that capitalist humanity has used to preserve the standard anthropocentric space have been instrumental in putting that same space in crisis.

With this un-privileging of origin stories, this thesis queers the notions of progress and modernity that govern the Anthropocene. By building things through diverse engineering, without contemplation of what “it should be,” the scavengers follow the principles of “Jugaad”–an Indian concept with the closest translation being “making do” or “frugal innovation.”

Visphot While this Vellum entry was always meant to be furniture for the competition, it was created with the principle of Jugaad. The steering wheel was not concerned with its orinial instrumentality. It afforded sitting, so it was sat on. This method is intended to clear a space for the development of multiple alternative narratives, and to examine the way this diversity of narratives informs the structure of this society’s life around the interpreted meanings of the abandoned objects.

“A queer aesthetic can potentially function as a great refusal because art manifests itself in such a way that the political imagination can spark new ways of perceiving and acting on a reality that is itself potentially changeable.” José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia

blurring Section showing a structure built and occupied by the scavengers. The inability to identify different elements within the drawing is meant to invoke Donna Haraway’s concept of the Cyborg–an entity that blurs the essentialist boundaries created as a result of a capitalist Anthropocene–between humans and non-humans, humans and technology, and humans and the natural environment.

Limb-supporting Limb supporting apparatus apparatus with with free free movement capabilities,allowing allowingfor for a movement capabilties, multiplicity personal comfort. comfort. multiplicity of of personal

Body temperature regulating Body temperature regulating mechanism mechanism consisting of water-fille tube consisting of water-filled tube attached attached to a soft pad that rests on the to a soft pad that rests on the forehead. forehead

Wearable Wearablecontraption contraptionconsisting consistingof of a shearing shearingdevice deviceto tocut cut the the umbical umbical cord, aholding holdingdevice devicefor formixture the mixture for the for the healing and the the elongated elongated healingof of the the vagina, vagina and application for the same. application device device for the same.

Resistance-based attached Resistance based mechanism attached to flapwrapping wrappingaround aroundthe thepregnant pregnant toaflap person’s person’s stomach, stomach, assisting pushing.

Limb-supporting Limb supportingapparatus apparatuswith withfree free movement allowing for a movementcapabilities, capabilties, allowing multiplicity multiplicityof ofpersonal personal comfort. comfort.

Slide exit out outof of Slideto to aid aid the the little little human’s human’s exit the thehost’s host’s body.

Pooltotobe beoccupied occupiedby bythe thelittle littlehuman. human. Pool Spacefor forthe theremoval removalofofthe thelittle little Space humanfrom fromthe thehost hostbybydetaching disattaching human the the umbical umbical cord.cord.

“The complex and paradoxical experiences of diverse people as humans-in-the-world, including the ongoing damage of colonial and imperialist agendas, can be lost when the narrative is collapsed to a universalisizing species paradigm.” Zoe Todd Indigenizing the Anthropocene

The Anthropocene is a gentrifying term. When bodies are standardized, their expected behaviours are standardized as well. This image is attempting to challenge the accepted “rituals” of childbirth. When every person giving birth experiences it in different ways, why is the universalized horizontal bed the space of that experience?

The image shows a pregnant person in a contraption that is engineered by the scavengers to have free movement to allow for the pregnant body to position itself the way it needs to. The person in the back is manually aiding pushing using a resistance-based mechanism that allows them to push using their legs. The tube at the top of the mechanism holds water that trickles down the tubes and wets the attached fabric, keeping the pregnant person’s body temperature low. The baby slides down the tube into a pool as it leaves the body. These images have borrowed elements from indigenous birthing practices of being somewhat vertical while giving birth, and the Nilotic tribe practice of assisted pushing.

This world is characterized by multiplicities; it is built on intersectionality. As it attempts to blur the binaries between humans, nonhumans, nature and technologies, that intersectionality is attributed to all those beings. Therefore, these images are a manifestation of that. The same contraption that was used as a birthing mechanism is utilized as a watering hold for a small bird, and a possible hunting ground for the hawk watching it. It also becomes a mechanism to build food, as in the image below. The resistance mechanism used by the person to aid pushing now becomes a collection spot that can push compressed food out throught the holes that held the pregnant personâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s body. The leg holders hold a fabric filled with herb water that drips over the food bundles as they roll down the slide the baby slid down on, into the same pool. One being or one action doesnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t hold privilege over the other, and the nuanced sentiments attached to actions are questioned.

Bathing spaceoccupied occupied by bird. Bathing space by bird. Potentially hunting ground if it doesnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t Potentially a hunting ground if it does see see the hawk soon. soon. not the hawk

Squishing mechanism allowing Squishing mechanism allowing foodfood pushed in throughto to be be broken down pushed through compacted and compacted through and be through pressure and pressure be pushed pushed in cyclindrical bundles. down indout cylindrical bundles. Holder anddripper dripper food-enhancer Holder and of of food enhancer agent agent.

Resistance based mechanism for holding Resistance-based mechanism for and pushing through. holding and food pushing food through.

Twisting with needles at Twisting mechanism mechanism with needles at the endend that that attach to protruding food the attach to protruding food bundles and them together bundles andbraids braids them together. Slide braids Slide for for food food braids toto slieslide downdown amidst the dripture of enhancing agent. agent. amidst the drops of enhancing Bundle filled with food cooking Bundle holder holder filled with food cooking agentand and heated for for the the agent heatedpebbles pebbles soaking of of food soaking foodbundles. bundles.

“the world has Boetzkes, drawing tilted on its axis” Amanda upon Inuit obsevations

“the world has tilted on its axis” The Anthropocene is an aesthetic event, therefore, queering it requires a “re-ordering of our biological perception under the Anthropocene,” as Amanda Boetzkes argues. This means that the ways in which we perceive time, catastrophe, and loss shifts. To be able to conceptualize this, this thesis turns to Indigenous knowledges and epistemologies. Time remains crucial in how we perceive the world. Indigenous communities view time as a cyclical mechanism, where the past exists simultaneously in the present, simulating a future. This allows them to perceive death and birth as gears in the larger scope of things. Within Western thought, Individuality is privileged and time is linear. One lifetime is marked by birth and death, and there are specified emotions attached to those concepts. If the concept of Individuality is decentered, then temporalities shift. This image is an attempt to question the temporalities of a life. In the first hole on the left, a person is relaxing, and communicating with the person who is layering food in the second hole. The third hole holds bodies that are no longer alive. It remains irrelevant if they were buried at the same time or years apart, because the past is simultaneously the future and, at the end of the day, they will become compost for something else to grow from. The fourth hole holds an ostrich sitting on her eggs, waiting for her babies to become alive. This representation is an attempt to question the esoteric behaviors attached to handling death, and all that a death seems to demand. If de-centering occurs, is death sacred?

â&#x20AC;&#x153;Time, is the accumulation of a lifetime of passing through environments that offer certain kinds of affordances, which then influence the collective perceptions and sensations of the organisms of the earthâ&#x20AC;? Heather Davis and Etienne Turpin

⅔ cup olive oil 4 cloves garlic, grated 1½ tablespoons smoked paprika 1 pound bone-in skin-on chicken drumsticks or thighs 2 small to medium russet potatoes 2 red bell peppers, sliced lengthwise 1 yellow onion, cut into 8 wedges 4 sprigs rosemary kosher salt 2 tablespoons sherry vinegar

3-4 medium yukon potatoes 1 head of radicchio cilantro chives kalamata olives (halved) 1/3 cup olive oil 1 lemon (juiced) salt and pep havarti cheese

Start with a singularity. Expand rapidly via inflation until elementary particles emerge. Let rest for 9 billion years, then clear a large work space and distribute these particles unevenly—allowing gravitational forces to cohere these particles into clouds of plasma. If these bits stick to the pan, don’t worry, we will make use of them in the sauce later. Make a gravity well, and then, stirring slowly, condense the plasma until thermonuclear fusion occurs. Be careful, this part is hot, and will result in flaming balls of matter orbiting a star. Allow a generous time to cool. Take a suitable ball of matter and bombard with any small leftover crumbs from the adjacent work surface, making sure to work in a small amount of water and organic chemical compounds. Let mixture rest for 4.5 billion years, or until a crust forms and moisture from the center off-gases. Observe the texture change as the exterior becomes smooth and forms an atmosphere, resulting in a biosphere with many species of plant and animal life. (Editors Note: This process can be toxic, so wear proper safety equipment.) Place your matter sphere in a room temperature sunny spot. Allow humanity to rise. If they have developed language and other concepts that frame this biosphere as a human resource, you know the process is working. You may now forget everything in the process up to this point. Now that your humanity has risen, you may conveniently procure all of the ingredients you need from a store. Add the oil, garlic, and paprika to a small bowl and stir to combine. Coat the chicken and bake at 450°F for one hour. Transfer everything from the sheet pan to a serving platter, then pour the vinegar onto the sheet pan and use a small whisk to scrape up any browned bits and combine it with the drippings. Pour the drippings and vinegar mixture on top of everything and serve. Dine. Gaze out the window at all you own. With every fork-full, contemplate your position in the universe. Feel the smallness wash over your being as you take another bite of your measly chicken.

Cube the potatoes into bite-size chunks. Boil them until they are soft (enough that you can stick a fork or knife easily into the chunk without resistance). Take a chunk and slowly press it through the tines of a fork. Observe how the soft potato squishes up through the tines. Think about how rarely we are asked to squish things. Think about how squishy a term like “squishy” is. “Squishy” is a word for things that words can’t adequately describe. The fork is turning the potato into something entirely new, unprecedented, and heretofore unknown. Find other things through which you can squish potatoes: a cheese grater, a comb, a keyhole, an electrical outlet, your nose. Keep squishing the boiled potato chunks. This is fun! We’re going to need more potatoes. Once more potatoes have been procured, look at each of them. Notice how totally weird they are. They’re each so different. Hold them in your hands. Think, what other purposes the potato might have. While you ponder the potato, explore your kitchen for something that might hold the boiled bits. Notice the way the counters lend themselves to other activities. Perhaps perch yourself on the ledge, feel the cool comfort of the tile against your skin. Grab your lemon juice, olive oil, salt, and pepper. Combine the ingredients with the boiled potatoes, mixing with your hands. Feel the textures of the various ingredients as they meld through your fingers. Notice the way the chunks slip around each other as they gradually homogenize. Once combined to your satisfaction, grab a knife and begin to chop your radicchio, cilantro, and chives. Wait! Actually, abandon the knife and tear the leafy greens with your hands instead, your toes, try all sorts of objects and observe the fantastic variations in size each one produces. Take a bite. Notice the slow progression of texture from cube to mash, as your teeth expertly grind down the cellulose and fibers. Savor the bite, move the pieces around your tongue, revel in the subtle flavors as they meet and mix. Such Joy! Find a nearby wall and kickstand so that you are upside down. It’s not often we get to see the world from this perspective. As children it’s so common to want to handstand, to spin, to shift our lens of the world. The support of the wall against your back allows you to remain upside down, to notice things you might otherwise miss. The alien feeling of swallowing the food so that it must fight the force of gravity in its effort to journey to the stomach. The crumbly texture of your cottage cheese ceiling. The grip of your fingers as they sink into the floor below you, suspending you in this altered state.

Chicken, Potatoes, and Peppers with Paprika and Sherry Vinegar

Tess Stilman & Lena Vogler

Zesty Potato & Spring Herb Salad

1 quail per person Stuffing: 5 oz of lean pork 3 ½ oz of veal 9 oz of greasy shortening 3 oz of foie gras of duck 2 spoonfuls of Armagnac salt - pepper - four spices 3 oz of fresh truffles, cooked, diced 1 ¾ oz of foie gras, half-cooked - diced 1 pint of Xérès (sherry)

3 young partridges 1 tablespoon of butter 2 onions 3 cups of dry white wine (white Burgundy) 1 pinch of thyme 1 bay leaf 2 tablespoons of butter 7 oz of lean bacon 1 tablespoon of butter 2 tablespoons of flour 6 slices of rye bread 7 oz of butter

Bone the quails, take one quail and using a tweezer, lift it up and place a funnel in the opening. Squeeze the bird using your hands, place your mouth on the funnel and scream your frustrations into it. The squishiness of the quail will allow you to transfer your stress into it. Repeat until all the quails are stressed by osmosis. Now, take the Sherry and pour evenly into the quails and sew shut. Next, eat the truffles, and hope they came from Amsterdam. If you had the vision to order them from the right place, you will begin to see colors in 3...2...1....If nothing happened, throw everything away, this process is not worth it. If you are seeing colors now, take all the other meats and smush them together in a bowl. Using your hands, create art out of this dough. Take the Armagnac and, using a brush, paint over your shapes. Once the surfaces are sticky, make little piles of salt, pepper, turmeric, chili, cumin and coriander. Using this pallette, sprinkle over your art to recreate the colors you are seeing in your eyes. Since we said in the beginning that this going to be a peacock, chances are you are recreating a peacock with your art. Now, take a minute and let your sense of smell be heightened with all the colors you painted. Take your time, your quails aren’t going anywhere. Once your masterpiece is done, put it all together and make sure it somewhat resembles a peacock. Now, take a picture and put it on Instagram. Your work is done. Sit back and take a quail. Using its bone that you hopefully did not throw away, pierce into it and enjoy a nice cooking sherry. As your colors diminish, keep drinking until all the quails are empty and you have once again received the stress they were holding on to for you. Put the empty quails in a big ziploc, throw some vinegar in there and use the bag as a pillow, as you drift into a boozy nightmare.

To begin, grapple with the reality that what lays before you are partridges. Partridges that are, as it says on the container, “young” yet simultaneously in the latter-most state of their lived experience—that is to say, “dead.” No matter how much time has passed since these birds were butchered, they are still “young” because that’s what they were when they left this mortal coil and they haven’t exactly gone on to grow much since then, now have they? You could stick these gobbets of poultry in the freezer for 30 years (10 times the typical lifespan of a partridge!), or instead perhaps 10 times longer than your own lifespan, or even for some other unsteady eternity; and they would still come out as young partridges, bi-existing in perceived and semantic perpetuity between adolescence and expiry, on and on until you eventually come out of your stupor and just cook them already. When you do so, other recipes encourage you to add butter for palatability. Next, as the creator of the meal, it is your responsibility to wrap the partridge in bacon. This is a communication measure, meant to convey the nature of death—the young partridge’s half-state—while avoiding its larger unknowable implications and recounting its realities via modes the poultry will understand, i.e. meeting meat-a-meat. This should be a confrontation for all parties: for the partridge, for the bacon, and, most importantly, for you as the chef. The poultry will remind the pork of youth and wholeness; the bacon will whisper words of knives and post-processing; and you will salivate over your own mortality. What a triad you all are. Keep the pan covered for 45 minutes and cook very gently; the butter should not turn brown. Here it is important to remember that this dish was never designed specifically for the partridge. All around you while this has been happening, somehow, onions have been browned in a pan of butter and stirred, seemingly years ago, into a sauce of white wine, a bay leaf, ground pepper (a lot), salt (very little), the pestled carcasses of other young partridges, and thyme (burdensome thyme). The sauce will reduce. Inherit that reduction and introduce it to the poultry. Some other recipe would give you very specific instructions on how to do so, but I’m afraid to say that these are new times that we are living in and frankly those old fogies just can’t cut it anymore. They’d probably recommend you put everything on toast—but how is toast going to accent all this sauce you have to deal with? Are we just going to keep on soaking up sauce with toast for the rest of time? Or worse, adding more butter? Knowing everything we know today, you’re just going to let some dusty old recipe drown these poor birds in butter—when you are the only one who truly understands the weight of death and sauce and the murmured memories of thin-stripped pork flank?

Peacock à l’Impériale Dressed and Surrounded by its Court

Navaya Vishnoi & Ethan Scofield

Young Partridges on Toasts

DECENTERED DWELLING TESS STILMAN

BREAKDOWN

$ Anthropocentric thought has framed nature as an aesthetic and material resource, leading to such environmental crises as climate change.

Anthropocentric ideology has been exacerbated by language, limitations to perception, and architectureâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s ability to construct artificial space that seems real.

! ! !

Therefore, architecture must be designed in a way that utilizes technology to decenter humans with respect to the environment .

By dramatizing environmental variation and affording it the agency to transform human space, humans might be able to achieve a condition that approximates wildness.

Architecture, therefore, would contribute to the decentering of the anthropocentric world view, and a change in humanityâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s perspective of the Earth.

PROJECT

THESIS

ARGUMENT

The idea that there are two worlds, the wild, natural world, and the human-centric, un-wild world, is a pervasive human construct. As a result of this separation, the natural world has been framed as a material and aesthetic resource for humanity. Separating the two has led to a disconnected condition in which humans assume that nature is a subservient entity to be looked upon and offered for human consumption. Several factors have contributed to this hierarchy: biased definitions of wild, nature, and ecology; humanity’s inability to perceive the entirety of the natural world; a built environment that allows humans to live artificially in areas that without intervention could not be occupied; and an improper but popular theory of performance that dominates the field of environmentally conscious architecture. Humanity’s limited perception, combined with a faith in its ability to completely and accurately observe the world, and to therefore be able to predict the outcome of its actions within the world, has led to human-engineered effects upon the planet that are incredibly problematic, and which exceed the ability to accurately predict and control. In reality, humans are part of the greater ecosystem that occupies Earth, and must acknowledge a mitigated position that rejects such an anthropocentric hierarchy. The possibility of a new form of human perception in which the world is seen as wild, and in which human space is inextricably entangled, would be a useful corrective to humanity’s prevailing anthropocentrism. However, this anthropocentricism seems so incontestable, since it is sustained by an instrumental human technology. Therefore, wildness must be artificially constructed—by using human technology, such as architecture, in a non-instrumental manner to reveal and dramatize natural variation, translating it to spatial and temporal dimensions accessible to human perception, and integrating it into daily life in a manner that disturbs the sense of human insulation from and control over the natural world. Because there are limits to human perception, seen in Timothy Morton’s concept of hyperobjects and the psychological condition of optimism bias, architecture has the opportunity to act as an information processing system (IPS) that translates the natural word into something that can be read by the user. This reading eventually allows the user to develop an intuition about aspects of the natural world that escape normal perception.

The idea of dwelling extends beyond people living in houses. The concept of “oikos” exists as an established othering, enabled by current modes of architecture, that separate the occupant from the outside world, therefore upholding the social anthropocentric hierarchy. This thesis calls into question the idea of oikos by weakening the membrane between the built environment and natural environment. Framed as an updated Case Study House Program, this speculative project imagines a form of dwelling updated for contemporary times. This presentation focuses on two case studies, which each work to dramatize environmental conditions with respect to how they interact with the occupant. As the Case Study Program sought to establish a new kind of dwelling to meet the challenges of its time, contemporary dwelling should seek to address our current challenge: environmental degradation. By incorporating a type of wildness, driven by environmental conditions and translated by the architecture of the house, humanity becomes decentered. In these two studies, walls and privacy are negotiated, and views are controlled by natural forces, not the occupant. These dwellings seek to condition the user to a rhythm more in tune with the natural forces at play.

HYDROHOUSE SYSTEMS living room from above, as seen through the rain-harvesting glass roof

One of the simplest architectural elements available for kinetic manipulation is the wall. A wall is used to define space, establish privacy, and distribute amenities. If water were to act as both a resource and a structural element, the user would have to negotiate between consumption and privacy. While traditional resource distribution is concealed, this type of wall allows for consumption, a hyperobject, to be directly perceived. The walls are composed of cells. Fixtures like sinks, tubs, and toilets are fed with the clean water from the walls; the water is then discarded through pipes. As the wall behind the sink is depleted the walls begin to sag. Slowly, the water is redistributed through the cells.

bathroom fixtures consume water from a water-filled storage wall, compromising that wall’s affordance of privacy

Hyperobjects include but are not limited to “global warming, nuclear radiation, tectonic plates, biosphere, [and] evolution.” Timothy Morton, Poisoned Ground

transverse sections

HYDROHOUSE EXPERIENCE bathroom window moves according to the motion of the waves

Ecology is derived from the Greek “union of oikos with logos, which allows it to be loosely translated as ‘the relations of home,’ and implies a field of study in which humans occupy a centered and sheltered space, distinct from the natural context being studied.” James Corner, Ecology and Landscape as Agents of Creativity

dwelling from above—the enclosure and fenestration are governed by the waves, while the floor remains static

DECOMMODIFYING THE VIEW

In the Villa Savoye, Le Corbusier attempts to integrate nature and the built environment. However, his attempt to integrate leads to a condition in which nature is seen as a commodity. Some of Le Corbusierâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s five points unintentionally insulate dwellers from the natural environment. The use of pilotis elevates the house away from the ground. Both metaphorically and physically the user is elevated above the natural environment they occupy. A loss of the natural ground plane creates an area of occupation that is distinct from the natural landscape, but feels real. The sensation of reality is augmented with the use of ribbon windows. Ribbon windows bring the landscape into the house but in a way that flattens the dynamic landscape into artwork. The landscape is literally framed as an aesthetic resource. By freeing the window from the static ground plane, the view is no longer owned by the occupant, but by the sea. The Hydrohouse decommodifies this view, but leaves a sense of natural variation and wonder.

longitudinal section

LAUNDRY

KITCHEN

DINING ROOM

BEDROOM

STUDY

TV ROOM

BATHROOM

plan

TOWERHOUSE SYSTEMS

â&#x20AC;&#x153;Technology is a way of revealing.â&#x20AC;? Martin Heidegger

water holding tanks and living pod

This building is a home for a single resident. It is composed of a series of panels that offer power, water, animal inhabitation, farming, and so on. The occupant must ascend or descend the tower in order to utilize these different programmatic elements, whose effectiveness is correlated to, and thus dramatizes, natural forces and rhythms. For example, bathing at the top would be permitted during the rainy winter months, but not during the dry summerâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;highlighting seasonal variation or human-induced drought. Likewise, wind- and solar-powered facade panels highlight various patterns during the day, requiring the user to adjust their behavior if he or she needs to perform activities that require electricity. Over time, the user would develop an intuition about the planet and its natural forces, adapting their daily routine to fit those forces.

input mechanism for programmatic elements

LIVING POD ASSEMBLY

ENERGY

RESOURCES

MEDIA

DESCEND

ACTIVATE

TOWERHOUSE EXPERIENCE

“The island of the senses, that wraps every man like a garment, we call his umwelt.” The experience of the tower is one of precariousness.

JakobThe von Uexkull, Anslightly Introduction tower itself sways in the wind.to Umwelt

the living pod moves up and down the tower to access various programmatic elements

LIFE AND ROUTINE The issue with how designers currently address environmentally conscious building is that they focus too heavily on building environmentally sensitive architecture with the experience of a normal building. When the architectural concern with respect to the environment is simply one of minimizing carbon footprint, the manner of its performance does not require that performance to be observed, or in any way entangled with daily life. So, for example, the Bullitt Center performs in the background, and otherwise strives to afford its users a normative office building. However, in contrast, when the architectural concern with respect to the environment is determined to be one of redefining human space, or human behavior within that space, then the performance must be dramatic, and meaningfully integrated into oneâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s daily life and daily routines.

water collection

media power panel

a SMELLY, VIBRATING, and HAPTIC experience MINH HONG

CHALLENGING ABLEISM

[SONIC PATHWAYS]

rip·ple noun 1. a small wave or series of waves on the surface of water, especially as caused by an object dropping into it or a slight breeze. 2. a type of ice cream with wavy lines of colored flavored syrup running through it. “raspberry ripple” Waves – movement in which it is not the medium itself, but some disturbance that is traveling. When a wave is audible, it is called a ‘sound wave.’ Sound waves can be identified as being periodic or aperiodic. Columns are programmed/produced to emit either periodic or aperiodic sounds. Circulation between different pockets of space can be determined by following various pathways produced by these vibrating chime columns. These columns are held up by steel hangers attached with an electrically-triggered hammer to produce the vibrations. The vibrations are transfered from studios and a floating music hall to public circulation. Pathways are formed by vibrating ripples that intersect and create nodes of direction.

(i.) abstract cloud-space

ABSTRACT

This thesis investigates the human senses and how they interact with architecture. The surrounding environment is constantly being perceived through the excessive reliance on the eyes. With only the sense of sight, individuals can become detached from the relationship their bodies have with the physical environment through the suppression of our other senses. The use of non-visionary sensorial effects can construct new environments and can defamiliarize certain spaces, as well as creating current vibes and moods. This is an aesthetic approach in changing what is known into something that is alternative. This link between aesthetics and spatial contexts react with users on many levels â&#x20AC;&#x201C; levels of comfort or even distress. This project will illustrate techniques that employ the nonvisual senses to produce spatial and aesthetic conditions that extend architectural engagement. With the use of vibrations and scented circulation, daily activity can be interrupted, and otherwise form multi-sensory experiences. ... _

(ii.) vellum 19, instrument/lamp, mr. mood

(iii.) map of Thailand

MALLS, FISH, AND HUMANS. NEW WORLD MALL [abandoned]

(iv.) interior photos of the abandoned New World Mall

[LIFE WITHIN DESTRUCTION] The New World Mall was closed in 1997 after it was found to have breached building regulations, before a fire in 1999 left it without a roof. Some believed the fire was started by locals because it was too tall. Lots of people in old town Bangkok think it is insulting to build something taller than The Grand Palace. Rainwater slowly filled the building, causing a major mosquito problem. In an effort to rid themselves of the pests, the locals introduced freshwater talapia fish to eat the insects. The koi fish later joined the party in this strange urban pond. Local shops sell fish food for visitors to throw to the fish, but tossing anything else in the lake is banned, as residents try to protect the animals from coming to harm. [converted] BANG LAMPHU MARKET

(v.) phase 01

(vi.) design experiment (smell - audio vibrations)

(vii.) phase 02

LEO CAILLES

THIS DESIGN THESIS AIMS TO PRODUCE AN AESTHETIC CONDITION THAT The healthy human mind collapses the plural potentiality of reality in order to simplify the world AFFORDS A NEW FORM OF HUMAN SUBJECTIVITY-ONE MORE ATTUNED TO enough for it to be understood. As an extension of the human experience, architecture supports EPHEMERALITY AND EMERGENCE RESULTING FROM OUR PROBLEMS WITH and proliferates this effort by framing reality in a FORCES PREVIOUSLY UNSEEN. manner that is legible and comprehensible, which

IN FACE OF THE ABSURD

There are, however, things that we do that endanger our experience, regardless of our

in turn provides the understanding that existence is stable and readily navigable.

intentions. Oftentimes, these self-destructive tendencies remain concealed until they take

Driven by a study of the 20th century existentialists, Change Order is a critique of the Silicon Valley’s architectural tendencies and an imagined reversal of these weaknesses. us to the brink of catastrophe. Taking on the appearnce of a shanty megastructure, the project holds a mirror up to society using How should we conduct ourselves in the face of infinite complexity?

architecture as a medium to philosophically highlight our shifting and rapidly evolving conceptions of objectivity.

DAILY STUDY :: 300 CONSECUTIVE DAYS

SINCE THIS PROJECT CALLS FOR THE PRODUCTION OF A LAYERED AND And because this thesis employs an existentialist approach [placing emphasis on action and situation] METAPHORICAL AESTHETIC CONDITION, MORPHOLOGICAL ARCHITECTURAL each idea was carried out once a day, every day, for the entire duration of the design project. STUDIES BECAME THE PRIMARY ENGINE FOR ITS DEVELOPMENT. Many ideas were cut, while the rest were overwritten or altered beyond the original scope of their analysis.

DAILY VISUAL STUDY

CASE CASE CASE CASE CASE CASE CASE CASE CASE CASE

STUDIES STUDIES STUDIES STUDIES STUDIES STUDIES STUDIES STUDIES STUDIES STUDIES 1. FACEBOOK HQ SIGN, MENLO PARK CA

2. BEHIND THE SIGN

3. VASARI CORRIDOR, FLORENCE IT 7. KOWLOON WALLED CITY, HONG KONG

4. GM FACTORY, FREMONT CA

8. MAISON MEDICAL HOUSING, BELGIUM

5. NUMMI FACTORY, FREMONT CA

6. TESLA FACTORY, FREMONT CA

DAY 170: ABSTRACT

DAY 204: SECTION SHOW

DAY 170-230: MORPHOLOGICAL URBAN STUDIES

DAY 275: DETAIL

DAY 300: 1/16”=1’0” MODEL

DAY 300: MODEL

DAY 274:DETAIL SHOW

Y A W A R A F Y R E V STARLIGHT SO , E V I L A L L I T S S I N A M F I 5 2 5 2 R A E Y THE D E E N A N N O G T ’ N I A 5 3 5 3 R A E Y E H D IN T N I S I Y A S D N A O D , K N I H T U O Y G N ERYTHI T E E T R U O Y D E E N A N N O G T ’ N I A 5 4 5 AR 4 N O G S ’ Y D O B O N — W E H C O T G N I ND A TH R U O Y 5 5 5 5 R A E Y E H T N I . U O Y T A OK S E D I S R U O Y T A P M I L G N I G N A H E R MS A E M O S : O D O T G N I H T O N T O G S G E L R U IN U O Y R O F T A H T ACHINE IS D OING O N D E E N A N N O G T ’ N I A 5 6 5 6 R A E Y HE L ’ U O Y — E F I W O N D E E N T ’ N O W , USBAND T R E T H G U A D R U O Y K C I P , N O S R U O CK Y Y E H T N I . A O H ,W E B U T S S A L G G N F A LO O O L L L ’ E H E B Y A M . N E H T Y B T I E K A OM I ” ! Y A D T N E M E G D U J E H T R O F E M T’S TI S R E H T I E L L ’ E H N E H T D A E H Y T H IS MIG N I . N I A G A T R A T S D N A N W O D T I R A E RT N E K A T S ’ E H E V I L A E B A N N O G S I F MAN W O N — G N I H T O N K C A B T U P T ’ N I A ND HE T A H W R O F S R A E T N O I L L I B A D E I R HAS C ERNAL NIG

M Y E H T , E V I V R U IF WOMAN CAN S — S E I L O N L L E T , H T U R T E H T L L E T O DT E H T N I Y A D O T K O O T U O Y L L I P E H NT N O W U O Y , S E Y E R U O Y D E E N T ’ N O T H, W NNA

AN ARCHITECTURE TO BRIDGE TEN MILLENNIA

A COMPENDIUM OF THE UNSTEADY, THE INIMICAL, & THE UNCANNY

LL M O T T O B E H T TOO FROM H G U O E H ’ N I M O C A S ’ D O G F I 0 1 YEAR 75 S S E U G “ Y A S D N A F L E S M I H D N U O OK AR K A H S A N N O G S I D O G 0 1 5 8 R A E Y IN THE E E B S A H N A M E R E H W D E S A E L P ’M I SAY N I R E D N O W A D N I K ’M I 5 9 5 9 R A E Y N THE I G N A C H T R A E D L O S I H T G N I H T EVERY M S R A E Y D N A S U O H T N E T N E E B S ’ W IT N G I E R S ’ N A M W O N — W E N K R E V E T HE N O S T H G I L R A T FS O G N I L K N I W T E GHT TH IN THE Y

“PATINÆCENE”

SELECTED POEMS BY AHNET DESCLIFO

These poems, written as a series by the elusive twenty-first century poet Ahnet DeSclifo, were made public after a recent discovery of several other texts, artifacts, and correspondences privately collected by the late Ethan Scofield, an architectural scholar and dimensionalist researcher from San Luis Obispo, California. The Scofield Compendium was posthumously uncovered and published by an undisclosed colleague of the collector as anthology entitled An Architecture to Bridge Ten Millennia. This collection included a partially drafted thesis text on Scofield’s architectural theories and an expansive archive of primary sources that Scofield had obtained to support his claims. One particular point of obsession for Scofield was the work of the amateur mythematician, and peculiar Beaux-Arts architectural partisan, Thane Fiescold—Ahnet DeSclifo’s godfather and childhood mentor. These poems were of particular interest to Scofield because they appear to be directly related to the theories of Thane Fiescold, who advocated strongly for embracing what he called “Counter-Virtruvian” or “Cosmic” architecture as a means to combat the horrific and unpredictable nature of the impending Post-Anthropocene. With the permission of the Ethan Scofield estate, this publication has chosen to display this selection of poetry alongside Scofield’s anotations. A majority of the chosen images were also collected by Scofield and depict the Temple to Perpetuity, which roams the deserts of Nevada and houses the Presageric Order of American Nuclear Anchorites—Scofield believed that this temple and the quasi-religious institution it holds epitomized the theories represented in the poems of Ahnet DeSclifo and the theories of her enigmatic godfather.

meop tset a si sihT Children of steel, and inheritors of rust, j;kl jak;lkjfsd The wrought iron people pray rotely to themselves: fsdl;ajkl;fsjlkda fhdja fjdska;l KJL;JA .I a We, the children, will grind at the rust in spots meop tset a si sihT or ignore it altogether in others l;lkfjdsa and lavish in the remaining puddles of shine and freshkpaint j;kl jak;lkjfsda fsdl;ajkl;fsjlkda but this cannot last forever. fhdja AKJL;JA The rust, cultive and ruddy, will feel otherworldly, fjdska;l alien and hostile. fjdksla Run your hand against it and it might cut you, fkjdas yet, at its touch --

to rust is to die, to rust is to lose godliness and cleanliness, to rust is to be overcome by entropy.

Scofield’s Notes: 1.1 What is the rust that DeSclifo is so focused on in this poem? Is it an allusion to the Anthropocene? She seems to be creating a dichotomy between those that fear the rust or ignore it and those that accept it and see it as a logical consequence of human action. 1.2 The rust here seems to be DeSclifo’s attempt to depict the world as Uncanny. Fiescold often argued that, in architecture, the Uncanny [one of the three elements of his Counter-Virtruvian Triad] could be accomplished by the use of uncommon or uncomfortable materials that would mark the passage of time, or estrange themselves from normal/anthropic conceptions of conventional use. Rust, as a byproduct of unforeseeable material interactions, as well as time, is the ultimate uncanny and post-anthropic material! 1.3 “To rust is to age.” Fiescold argues that “now is the time to fight monsters with monsters” — is Desclifo playing with this idea? Is she claiming that we must rust along with the world? That we must incorporate ourselves with the hyperobjects of the post-anthroposcene, in order to advance into a new age of architectural innovation?

;fjdskla ;fldsjalk fhjad;h to rust is to age. dfmettle a jkfldsof ajlthe ;fdjearth skal;jat kflyour ;dsjkafeet. ;jfl;kdsa to rust is to know the true to rust is to be outpaced by the past. heaghjfjkdsal ajk;flljkdsa jlkfsdhalkj II.

kfldshjak;hfklsadj ahfkjsda lk;j;falkjsd Call it the Patinæcene ssa dsahjw aj;fjdslak fsdjalk see the polish where mankind has long rubbed its hands together-fjdksl enecænitaP feel the rust abrasive where mankind has, so far, looked away-fkjdas age with a world that you oxidized with boisterous breaths ;fjdskla ;fldsjalk fhjad;h dfa jkfldsajl;fdjskal;jkfl;dsjka;jfl;kdsa heaghjfjkdsal ajk;flljkdsa

IV. Poetry gained its true glory for me ,laititsretni era sreitnorF when I realized eht that all the rules and regulations sem oh doohdlihc ni dekcap ,sgab dezinagro yltaen era y of language were cca-gnol htiw yvaeh fluid snedrub detalumu impermanent, yawa hguone raf reven dlroW dlO na fo srednimer and malleable. .su fo daeha yal srietnorf ynaM Human beings are the makers of language, it will always be a tool for OUR bidding !Forever! --uoy erad I ,nus eht htiw trilF sserdnu How often / do we lose track / of the machinations / of human ylylin s osthe sra/ eeveryday w eh yks /fearthly o niatruexperience? c taht fo mih handiwork / embedded dnu dna ,htaenre How dearly I wish I could whisper ht ssik in the ear of the architect and tell her that she is as much of a poet as I am sisI sseddog e because the two of us play with .sliev dereyalitlum ,ynam reh hguorht oobleck professions .srby eitanblind orf nogod sel:: pmet ruoy dliuB :yas ot si tahT :: divinely overseen .sreitnorf oT acideD "Push and pull," I might suss softly to her, however you like no dlboundaries, iub uoy noziroh eht ot reven meht et and you will find no lawful sni tub only gradient peripheries of the heart noziras ohfact wen hcae ot daet let no man lay down the laws of architecture .socitrin op the elbrface am hs erthe f ehhuman t morftempo deweiv for they will melt like glaciers of eht dear yb dearchitect, captuo eb ofor t si the tsur ot .eno wen a eb syawla ereht yaM Build, day .tsap fletch thine arrow with a steady heart and let the age melt past you in time to the human tempo see it circle the drain: obliging, intent, and glittering before melding into the unsteady, inimical, and uncanny dirt below.

Scofield’s Notes: 4.1 Fiescold often describes the Unsteady [another element of his Counter-Virtruvian Triad] as an “architecture uprooted.” He describes a need for architecture to MOVE: in order to respond to variable conditions over several timescales and to translate imperceptable change at a more human scale. DeSclifo’s poem is also uprooted: celebrating a literary freedom from established rules of grammar and structure— drawing from the ephemeral nature of all human languages.

4.2 As human beings are “the makers of language,” so too are they the makers of architecture. It is important for us to remember our complete authority over what can be built and how it can be built. DeSclifo challenges the concept of tradition-based art forms, be it prescriptive rules for language or established forms in architecture. 4.3 How often do we lose track of the machinations of human handiwork embedded in architecture? It can take a second to realize that the line where physics stops and true human invention

begins, in terms of built-structures, is relatively close to the beginning. Laugier’s Primitive Hut might feel like the epitome of architectural beginnings, but the human hand can be felt strongly in that, with its straight walls and triangular pediment, a convention we have maintained for centuries— why? Is it the most logical solution to the central architectural question? Is it the most appropriate design for every situation? Or is it merely a learned tic? A rote response? Perhaps, just as language morphs around those who speak it, architecture should morph to meet counter-Virtruvian affordances.

XII. as the legend stands, Thomas built a faith with no gods to protect humans from humans who had lived in a human-centric world. Thomas built a faith with no gods. the classicists couldn't understand who had lived in the human-centric world and suddenly their temples felt upside down. the classicists couldn't understand because they were afraid, and suddenly their temples felt upside down-they would never stand again Because they were afraid to protect humans from humans, they would never stand again as the legend stands

XIV.

"Final frontier, huh?" meop tset a si sihT I whisper to the loam beneath me, the sky above-kl;lkfjdsa I look into that great fuming eye of the sun j;kl jak;lkjfsda and it flirts with me and sort of challenges me fsdl;ajkl;fsjlkda all at once fhdja AKJL;JA fjdus ska;l all the while that 13.8 billion year old "om" behind hums like static from an old T.V. fjdksla left on overnight -- what some people might call "snow" fkjdas cozy and claustrophobic, blanketing all space and time with a thin, ever-present reminder of the Beginning. ;fjdskla ;fldsjalk fhjad;h Frontiers are beginnings,dfa jkfldsajl;fdjskal;jkfl;dsjka;jfl;kdsa they are broken, virgin soil heaghjfjkdsal ajk;flljkdsa and the worrying noises outside the window above your new bed jlkfsdhalkj Frontiers are interstitial, they are neatly organized bags, packed in childhood kfldshjhomes ak;hfklsadj heavy with long-accumulated burdens ahfkjsda lk;j;falkjsd reminders of an Old World never farssenough a dsahjaway w aj;fjdslak fsdjalk Many frontiers lay ahead of us. enecænitaP dnatsrednu t'ndluoc stsicissalc eht Flirt with the sun, I dare you-,diarfa erew yeht esuaceb undress him of that --curtain nwod ediof spsky u tle he f swears elpmetsori slyly eht ylneddus dna and underneath, niaga dnats reven dluow yeht kiss the goddess Isis through her many, multi-layered veils.diarfa erew yeht esuaceB ,snamuh morf snamuh tcetorp ot That is to say: Build your temples onnifrontiers. aga dnats reven dluow yeht To frontiers. sdnats dnegel eht sa Dedicate them never to the horizon you build on but instead to each new horizon viewed from the fresh marble porticos. May there always be a new one.

Scofield’s Notes: 8.1 Call me crazy, but is DeSclifo referencing Thomas Sebeok in this poem? Could she have known that Counter-Virtuvian theory would be so central to the original Sebeokeanasticalists and the designers of the Aevis Aevum temple? Of course not, she passed away before the temple was designed... but still, an odd coincidence. 14.1 Again, DeSclifo emphasizes the need for new beginings, or in this case “new frontiers.” She seems incredibly

focused on proving as Fiescold did that architecture reimagined. 14.2 “Many frontiers dared again I think should

Thane Fiescold, meanwhile, more directly addresses architecture and its canon by targeting the deeply engrained Vitruvian Triad and proposing that, by turning its tenets of Firmness, Commodiousness, and Beauty on their heads (replacing them with a dedication to what he designates as the Unsteady, the Inimical, and the Uncanny), architects might be better equipped to appreciate and confront the hyper-scaled issues that weighed on the design world and the public at large (e.g. most notably at the time: climate change).

XXI. It fell from space and said to me "I know no up I know no down I know only sitting

.I meop tset a si sihT kl;lkfjdsa j;kl jak;lkjfsda fsdl;ajkl;fsjlkda ;kjl;fjdsalkj; fjdska;l

jlk;jfkasd fjdksla fkjdas

` fsdjakl;jflkdsa ;fljkd;sa kl;; jlkdsa j;jflkdsa ;lkdsa sda;j ;fjdskla ;fldsjalk fhjad;h dfa jkfldsajl;fdjskal;jkfl;dsjka;jfl;kdsa heaghjfjkdsal ajk;flljkdsa jlkfsdhalkj kfldshjak;hfklsadj ahfkjsda lk;j;falkjsd ssa dsahjw aj;fjdslak fsdjalk enecÃ¦nitaP

A MOBILE SECTOR OF GLOBAL AND INFRASTRUCTURAL SPACE MAYA MASHIACH

While global networks afford power to the individuals they connect, they also render them vulnerable to the effects produced by others within the network. Consequently, the invisibility of global connectivity makes it possible for the exploitation of unsuspecting individuals by non-local agents. In addition, this invisibility inhibits individuals from taking full advantage of the potential power to resist that exploitation that global networks might afford. Although other virtual mediums of interaction have their advantages, their biggest downfall comes from the fact that their space of engagement is removed from the public sphere. However, a tangible infrastructure that could represent the flows and exchanges of globalization would allow for a conscious and public engagement with these forces.This tangibility would allow humans to gain an immediate and direct connection to the otherwise inscrutable global reality in which they live. This would result in a new subjectivity, wherein individuals become empowered to act within this global context. This thesis will demonstrate the potential of such a tangible manifestation of this global reality in the form of speculative globalized infrastructures for the city of Shanghai. The typology of infrastructure is familiar to humanity, and presents itself as an organized machine. This prescribed organization is in contrast to the accidental nature that takes place within life itself. This dichotomy between rational organization and the messy nature of humanity, however, could result in a desirable balance. If presented with an unorganized and sporadic infrastructure whose character and function is responsive to global agents, humanity can either flourish in this unbalance or suffer from its lack of relief. To flourish, individuals would need to view the physical destabilization that characterizes such an infrastructure not only as a means of global interconnectivity but also as a positive potential for bottom-up urban transformation. The political empowerment that such a virtualization affords is particularly crucial in the context of a city such as Shanghai. China, and more so Shanghai, provides the grounds necessary for both virtual and physical globalizations.

SAMPLE SITE

SHANGHAI, CHINA As the eastern terminus of the historic Silk Road, Shanghai has long been an agent in the global flows of economic and political power. Such agency, however, is in stark contrast to the relatively limited political freedom of its local population. The physicalization of its contemporary global connectivity through tangible infrastructures could therefore finally confer comparable agency to its citizens, and thereby allow Shanghai to serve as an example and catalyst for a new global subjectivity.

01 01

LOCAL-AGENCY SCREENS

02 02

03 03

HELICOPTER HELIPAD

BOAT-PARK TERMINAL

一九八八年十月十日

DOCKED OBJECTS

古松

一九八八年十月十日

黑竹迎

一九八八年十月十日

梅

Section Axonometric

LOCAL-AGENCY SCREENS These corporate-sponsored hovering infrastructures move throughout the city, engaging its citizens. Ostensibly used for advertising purposes, these entities solicit testimonials from individuals as a form of highly-visible corporate propaganda, which are subsequently featured on its screens. However, in enlisting the voice of everyday individuals, such individuals are empowered to respond in a manner that enables subtle critiques of the prevailing corporate and governmental power structures through tactics that include coded language, double entendre, body posture, and over- or under-enthusiasm.

Top: Clustered Site Plan on Nanjing Road, Shanghai

Bottom Left: Corporate Identity Axonometric Bottom Cener: Wall Section Bottom Right: Kit of Parts Axonometric

Exterior Blimp Structure Blimp Interior truss structure

Attatchment to lower truss

lower truss

Bracket attachment Connection from blimp to screen

Exterior truss backing attachment to truss screen

ground

In-Situ Axonometric

HELICOPTER HELIPAD This entity is a flying architectural extension to existing corporate towers that provides a temporary helipad and accessory space for face-to-face meetings conducted as part of global commerce. As it manifests its presence intermittently in the space of the city and at different times, it gives form to the fluid space of global forces that are entangled with the local reality of the city. Accordingly, it allows the impact of such global influences to be recognized by the cityâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s population. Meanwhile, during the times when this mobile infrastructure is attached to a corporate workplace, it affords the workers occupying that building the opportunity to inhabit and appropriate the spaces of this structure, which otherwise are programmed for the temporary work and leisure of the corporate executives conducting global business.

Top: Main Floor Plan, Connected to High-Rise

Bottom Left: Chunk Section Axonometric Bottom Center: Wall Section Bottom Right: Kit of Parts Axonometric outer rim PROPELLERS

w30x90 support concrete pad

UPPER TRUSS TUBE

Helipad base truss HELIPAD

NOODLE CROSS TUBES

light guage steel studs

interior gfrc paneling BUILDING CONNECTION FORMS

w18x76

Exterior gfrc paneling piping

LANDING TRUSS

base truss

In-Situ Axonometric

BOAT-PARK TERMINAL The Boat-Park Terminal allows citizens of Shanghai to physically engage the fluid spatial reality of global commerce. Its programmatic appropriation by the local population takes advantage of the political and legal flexibility of such space to transcend the existing geographical and cultural reality within China. In this case, the political and legal looseness of these floating warehouse spaces is leveraged by the local population in order to afford an extension to Shanghaiâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s public spaces. Located on the Huangpu River near the Bund in Shanghai, this entity ostensibly serves as an offshore warehouse to temporarily store goods that are being imported to or exported from China. However, its ample deck surfaces have become a place for the spontaneous creation of new public programs and events including: farming; chicken coops and cattle pens; selling fresh produce, noodles, pancakes, and other food; and spaces for fishing, doing laundry, and sleeping. In doing so, the fluid and liminal space of global commerce has become a new physical space whose inherent virtuality can offset the urban and political rigidity of Shanghai.

Top: Main Floor Plan, Through Warehouse

Middle: Taxonomy of Elements of Appropriation Bottom Left: Detail Section, Showing Dichotomous Use Bottom Right: Wall Section WATER TOWER

ELECTRIC LINES

SHACK

BILLBOARD

RADIO TOWER

WATERWELL

STREET FURNITURE

MARKET STAND

FOOD SHED

step down stairs

concrete filling

PURLIN HAHA green roof barrier w14x30

gfrc tiling

Light guage steel studs 4â&#x20AC;&#x2122; Structural truss Dropped ceiling

W18x50 barrier between undercarriage

what’s your habit? The spatial practice of dwelling has been disoriented by a conflation of global and local spatiotemporalities. While this condition has been a hallmark of modernity, there is not yet a subject equipped to apprehend it and perform within it. Instead of affording a perfectly resolved spatial condition that privileges local form and space, architecture should reflect the inherent contradictions of modern dwelling and cultivate a new global-local subjectivity. This thesis will demonstrate this through vignette studies of a new spatial condition born in a speculative future of seasonal inhabitation, where constituencies dwell on a seasonal time-share system. Through a co-authored reading and a contemporary expansion of the Situationist strategy of détournement, a flexibility of space is manifested from the flexibility of subjectivity. Détournement aims to bring forward an implication that destabilizes that of the original, thereby loosening the spatial and programmatic prescriptions that would otherwise hinder new forms of subjectivity and performance. Here, one can always feel the ghostly presence of another subject and its spatial practice.

Natalie Wanjek

being at home in the world

new subjectivities The Global-Local Nexus introduces a dual school of thought of simultaneous global scale and local scale consciousness. Here, spatial practice cannot be resolved; doing so is misleadingly utopic and ignores the nexus’ inherently paradoxical nature. Being-at-home-in-the-world includes the simultaneous practice of global and local concerns, to “see the universal in the particular without permitting the latter to get lost in the former.” 1 If we are a society estranged from global and local spheres, why not create a sense of dwelling from estrangement, to make peace with difference? Exercising the consciousness of the globallocal nexus allows architecture to engage in co-authorship. By bringing awareness to one’s spatiotemporal presence, one’s being-at-home-in-the-world, an individual’s spatial agency is foregrounded, resulting in a new subjectivity. In so doing, architecture is activated as a space both designed and chosen, evoked and created, “spatiality as simultaneously a social product (or outcome) and a shaping force (or medium) in social life.” 2 Similar to the Situationist International’s concept of unitary urbanism,

1.1

such architecture can only be successful in its continuous engagement by this newly empowered subject. However, the flexibility of space is manifested, not in moving walls and infinite physical assemblies, but rather in the flexibility of subjectivity. Spatial practice is created partially by design, the semiintentional charging of formal cues, and partially by predisposition. Predisposition, as a composition of both freedom and commonality, creates a new subjectivity and introduces architecture as a technology of communication in its ability “act in common while remaining internally different.” 3 Architecture in the global-local nexus must be written with multiple architectural cues that imply some formal state of use. The state that is manifested is dependent on which cues are brought forward by the subject. Cues are not mandates, but rather opportunities. Cues are peripherally experienced by all so that any one subject, despite their predisposition, can at the very least read the ghostly suggestion of all of the formal states. In this case, architecture is multifunctional. However, multifunctionality often implies that one space, in its vagueness and neutrality, can accommodate itself to

various uses. Instead, one must investigate multifunctional ability by addressing the specific characters of select uses and combing them in such a way that they are all present at once. This amalgamation depends on the relationships between the characteristics of each use’s formal state. The form has no hierarchy between uses, yet the form in relation to the subject does. In fact, the success of the space relies on one formal state being brought forward above others. This is the engaging moment of the architecture. There is a hierarchical choice to be made between multiple potential readings, which results in a custom action by the subject. While the space is designed, the identity of the space is based on how the subject chooses to read and subsequently act on it. Matt Waggoner, Adorno and the Problem of Dwelling (New York: Columbia Books on Architecture and the City, 2018), 13.

Edward W. Soja, Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory (London: Verso, 1989), 7.

3 Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (Penguin Books, 2004), xiv.

1.1 This lenticular effect exemplifies how multiple spatialities can exist at once. 1.2 Whatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Your Handle? is an object study meant to evoke the lifting bias of a subject through grip ergonomics. The slight illegibility allows a new subjectivity to discourage a prescriptive approach.

atâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s wh

yo ur ha nd le?

1.2

“We dwell in houses, neighborhoods, and cities, but we also dwell in things like writing and texts, among neighbors and strangers, and amid sensorial relations to pastness, presentness, and futurity (including all sorts of commingling of temporalities, such as when the present retains trances of the past or feels pregnant with expectation).” 1

It is important to note that a reevaluated concept of time-share inhabitation is required as it is traditionally, and unfavorably, one rooted in ownership and objectification. In contrast with an untethered Homelessness, Property Relation is another of Theodor Adorno’s various states of estrangement in dwelling that challenges our sense of being at home in the world. Dwelling as a subjective act is a lifelong developed relationship, but in modern society dwelling as “a relational process is objectified and made to appear as a thing.” 2 Objectifying dwelling encourages objective realities and interactions and, thus, the dissolution of being at home in the world. Modern dwelling that, instead, encourages nonexclusive inhabitation has the potential to reverse this and provide the sense of belonging that ownership failed to deliver.

it up

coffer

In order to thoughtfully investigate these conditions, the studies will be conceived in a speculative future which is hyperglobalized and, consequently, characterized by a culture of seasonal inhabitation. Seasonal inhabitation encompasses the locality of inhabitation as a cyclic state and simultaneously addresses the globalized character of individuals by encouraging them to integrate into multiple niche communities regardless of geographical convenience or constraints. The microcommunities would seasonally inhabit the proposed spaces, similar to a timeshare system, each exercising their own subjectivities.

look at all the producelook they atleft all the behind! produce they left behind!

CONSTITUENCY A

Move-In Day Move-In : January Day : January

this ash is a great fertilizer this ash is a great fertilizer

they left us compost too! they left us compost too!

CONSTITUENCY B

Matt Waggoner, Adorno and the Problem of Dwelling (New York: Columbia Books on Architecture and the City, 2018), 13. 1

Ibid, 115.

Move-In Day Move-In : June Day : June

I spy a potter with drainage... I spy a potter with drainage...

IT’S A VENT... IT’S A POTTER...

IT’S A VENT... IT’S A POTTER... ambiguities of the third ambiguities dimentionof the third dimention

coffer i coffer i

IT’S A BIRD! IT’S A PLANE! IT’S A BIRD! IT’S A PLANE!

2.1 Coffer It Up is a vignette study showcasing the ability of one element to serve various functions via a flexible subjectivity. it’s only a decorative technique... it’s only a decorative technique...

OR...

OR... I spy a vent to cook under... I spy a vent to cook under...

pick up some more additive-free charcoal pick up some more additive-free charcoal

hmm -- I can stand here hmm all day -- I can andstand I’m still here notall sunburnt... day and I’m still not sunburnt...

Inhabitation Inhabitation Term A : January Term A-:June January - June

these plants are sensitive these toplants UV light, are sensitive to UV light, put them under the low-e put them glass.under the low-e glass.

Inhabitation Inhabitation Term B : June Term - December B : June - December

2.1

3.1

bit of stuff

3.1

3.1 Bit of Stuff is a vignette study on the treatment of domestic possessions / storage strategy over time and accross constituencies. The ambiguity of the pegs challenges the idea of a unilateral “correct” use. 3.2 What’s Your Performance is an exercise in implementing the three détournement operations.

3.2

détournement

what’s your performance?

The Situationist International’s “fertile strategy in the critique of urbanism was that of deliberate distortion, the détournement. This technique presents preexisting materials or conditions in a light other than officially intended, so as to expose their fraudulent character.” The fraudulent character here is that of space read in order to yield a “correct” use. Instead of assuming one’s peripheral readings as misuse, one must note that there is no misuse in the co-authorship of space. Familiar cues (cues of habit) introduced in a distorted arrangement (scale, typology, etc.) requires the subject to acknowledge one’s assumed means of formal reading. The practice of détournement in this new urban condition can be exercised in threefold: multi-scalar motific kitbashing as a temporal experiment of habit via memory, reflections and disorientation (see above) as a representation of the virtual self and the physical self in spaciotemporal simultaneity, and the ambiguities of the third dimension as a spatial experiment of habit via perspective.

3.2

Delineo is a furniture design study meant to explore the co-authorship between the reading and the design of an object. In this instance, the frame (continuous ¼” steel rod) performs the reading of a sittingthing, and therefore suggests the action of sitting on the adjacent surface (single 16 gauge steel plate, powder coated). The steel frame figure illustrates the typological elements of a chair: an armrest, a chair leg, etc. as opposed to elements within specific typologies of chairs: lounge chairs, rocking chairs, etc. This is to encourage the action of sitting itself as opposed to associations embedded in the semiotics of chair typologies. To implement Gombrich’s Ambiguities of the Third Dimension, a figural element may appear to be coplanar from one angle, while in reality the steel frame is positioned at various depths. The chair-image reveals itself as the subject identifies figural cues, indulges one’s curiosity, and orients oneself to construct the forced perspective’s intended image.

When the subject approaches from either side, in profile, the frame implies a fully formed image of a chair. When the subject approaches directly from the front or back, the frame implies nothing. This suggests that with no implied action the object, in this moment, is not a chair. Delineo creates perpendicular perspectives of a fully delineated chair-image, or nothing, with a gradient of figural cues in between. The irony here is that the actual surface that one sits on is not what delineates the object as a chair. In order to emphasize the disjunction between the frame that implies sitting and the cube that one sits on, there are proportional incongruencies about the frame. From a distance these incongruencies are not noticeable, as the frame is meant to invite one to sit. Once one is actually sitting, the incongruencies become noticeable as the frame is perceived as slightly too large for human proportions. This is to accentuate that the

cube is for actually sitting and the frame is for reading the object – a means to sitting. Further, the materials are as abstracted as possible. To flatten the effect of the materiality, the steel plate cube hides the welded structure (see above) and is powdercoated white, and the steel rod has a cast iron finish as opposed to stainless-steel finish. The cube is meant to be a neutral object that can only be decoded by the steel frame chair-image. This is most successful if there are no cues from the materiality that suggest an alternative reading or action to be projected on the chair.

vellum delineo

ABSTRACT

The formation of urban culture is dictated by the mass repetition of daily social behaviors. However, this repetition only perpetuates itself; perceived progression primarily marks the accentuation of pre-existing social habits rather than any indication of genuine evolution. Consequently, a redundant and homogenous caricature of social behavior and culture paints the urban fabricâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s potential in black and white, suppressing the want for ambiguity and the value of spontaneity. The element of play performs a pivotal role in disrupting these patterns. In play, the innate obligation towards convention dissipates, along with the self-replication of urban culture. Therefore, the formation of unique and unpredictable circumstances through the vehicle of play pose to encourage meaningful and organic transformations in the physical and social interaction of the city.

BEN WASSINK

Cities demonstrate an inherent moderation of culture as a consequence of their embedded structure and functionality. However, the act of hosting the Olympics marks a particular deviation from a countryâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s cultural idiosyncrasy. In effort to assert an image of political or economic relevance, cities adopt a globalized ideology that dilutes their own culture for the sake of international comprehension. The pressure to adhere to this language, deeply rooted in the spectacles and dogmas of urbanism, inherently curbs many countriesâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; prospects of hosting. Meanwhile, those who attempt to accommodate disparate ideals often negate the promise of a functional civic legacy and the Olympic potential to evoke and showcase culture indicative of the site. However, an Olympics that privileges play, and employs the existing urban fabric to foster a sense of creativity, situates itself as a cultural catalyst. Such Games would provide the ability to critique the ubiquitous performance of urban life, while evoking the idiosyncrasies and fluidity of local culture.

FIVE RING FILTER

SCROLLING... SCROLLING... SCROLLING...

Scrolling embodies an interplay of indeterminacy and deliberation. When disassembled, the chair is clearly recognized as an indeterminate system, capable of a broad assortment of combinations. Yet, upon assembly, the distinction between parts repeatedly dissolves into a coherent and seemingly fixed structure, often carefully aimed to achieve a specific purpose. The value resides in the recognition of this relationship, and the willingness to exploit it. For instance, when one administers a non-conventional position, it is still perceived as intentional, encouraging people to rationalize new methods of occupation. While these initial non-conventional attempts may prove unsympathetic to the human form or conducive to comfort, they leave the architect to strategize and remedy incongruities through slight formal modifications. Scrolling through a deluge of combinations, the user can play with their own notions of functionality and enhance their understanding of the human form.

SCROLLING... SCROLLING...

The transient nature of Scrolling is primarily determined by the interplay of three factors: the orientation the large and small Y-frames assume when mounted, the sequence and selection of cylinders to support the fabric, and the tension of said fabric. In order to assemble, the smaller Y-frame is placed inside its larger counterpart. Lynch pins are then fed through holes in the sides of each frame to secure a point of rotation. Once a specific relational angle is determined braces are inserted on either side, not only fixing the angle, but preventing the chair from folding inward when weight is applied. After the frames have been secured, the fabric can be draped over the cedar cylinders and attached to the steel T-clasps located on their underside. Finally, the tension of the fabric can be adjusted with a spectrum of up to two feet. This, in tangent to the mounting placement, can dramatically alter the play and length of fabric. Furthermore, if the seat requires minimal adjustment, the braces can be temporarily removed and the frame slightly rotated. This process allows Scrolling a gamut of positions and a wide breadth of adaptation within each.

SCROLLING...

BARANGAY 649 BARANGAY 20

PASIG RIVER, MANILA,

WATER FILTRATION

BASECO COMPOUND TONDO

PHILLIPPINES

SANITATION

SHOWERS

BATHROOM

MOBILE INFRASTRUCTURE

GARDENING PLOTS

MARATHON START | FINISH

CANOE SLALOM

CANOE SPRINT

SAILING

TRIATHLON

MODERN PE

SITE1: BRIDGE

550â&#x20AC;&#x2122; | 1,450,870 sq ft | 46 fl

ROXAS BLVD

ERMITA, METRO MANILA

RESIDENTIAL

PEARL OF THE ORIENT

OFFICE SPACE MARKET DIFFERENTIAL SPACE

BOULEVARD

SITE 2: TOWER RESTAURANT

SWIMMING

WATER POLO

TRAMPOLINE

DIVING

SKATEBOARDING

ARTISTIC SWIMMNG

03_

Between community and education facilities Nursery for children after regular school time Additional education classes and individual room for learning

Screen and showcase along major circulation path

03_

Between community and education facilities Nursery for children after regular school time Additional education classes and individual room for learning

_02

Between community facilities and residential Community library Second-hand trading store Donating shelves

_01

Between residential and office/commercial Capsule living space Work and live Monday to Friday studio

03_

Between community and facilities Nursery for children afte school time Additional education cla individual room for learn

_04

Between attraction and educational facilities Rest area for visitor Meaningful education program associated with the attraction

_04

Between attraction and educational facilities Rest area for visitor Meaningful education program associated with the attraction

Yuran Liu

To Fold a City ... ...

Folding Beijing Introduction

_02

Between community facilities and residential Community library Second-hand trading store Donating shelves

_01

Between residential and office/commercial Capsule living space Work and live Monday to Friday studio

_02

Between community facilities and residential Community library Second-hand trading store Donating shelves

_01

Between residential and office/commercial Capsule living space Work and live Monday to Friday studio

d education

er regular

asses and ning

Screen and showcase along major circulation path

03_

Between community and education facilities Nursery for children after regular school time Additional education classes and individual room for learning

_04

Between attraction and educational facilities Rest area for visitor Meaningful education program associated with the attraction

In todayâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s urban environment, social stratification emerges, grows, and remains between individuals, families, and groups. With the practice of assigning specific programs to districts, blocks, buildings, levels, and rooms, this unhealthy social situation solidifies. In contrast, folding the space of the city could provide duality or even triality, allowing existing social structures to clash, collide, and collapse. History and culture then can be equally shared and accessed in order to stimulate creativity, working and living environments can be flattened, and resources can be freely distributed regardless of boundaries. To progressively envision a better city, a new method of architectural and spatial organization needs to be introduced. Foldingâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s ability to promote the experience of spatial continuity while preserving necessary differences can serve to defamiliarize the

city, enabling its residents and users to become more conscious of their living conditions and their surrounding environment. Such experiences promise to promote a new urban subjectivity in which individuals are no longer numbed by the routines of daily life and normative spatial experience, but are instead conscious and critical of their context, and thus more able to take positive action. Such a political potential is reinforced by the philosopher Jacques Ranciere, who argues that an aesthetic operation that defamiliarizes oneâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s reality might cause individuals Between community facilities and residential toCommunity observelibrary their world more critically, resulting in a new Second-hand trading consciousness ofstore and desire to revolutionize conditions Donating shelves such as their living condition, social status, or economic class. If these architectural operations can be used to fold urban spaces occupied by a sufficient number of Between residential and office/commercial individuals, the effect would Capsule living space be visible at the scale of a and liveorMonday community, aWork district, even toa Friday city. studio

_02

_01

To Fold a City ... ...

Folding Beijing Stories

One general entrance point would be from a office building. In this case, it would be the Galaxy Soho, where a platform would reach out toward the balcony roof of the lower connection level.

Similar to entrance three, entrance four is also a ground entrance point where slower movement is provided to experience changes in height levels.

Due to this continuous void spacing derived from the form that the waffle was generated from, there are numerous platforms serving as outdoor spaces above the street.

Similar to entrance one, another entrance point can be the upper connection bridge of the Galaxy SoHo.

When accessing a cell, a buffer zone would be provided, and then this world of separated “floating” platforms would be revealed.

The waffle structure can also be temporarily inhabited, hosting activities distinct from adjacent office and residential programsl.

Ground entrances are provided to people from the street to enter in through the elevator, vertically and horizontally.

The other access points focus more on a close-up view of the other layer fabric and spatial connection in the bubble interiors.

Bubbles can also “invade” other ordinary functionalities. In this case, common floor plates are connected with the bubbles.

Since 1988, with the publication and dissemination of Gilles Deleuze’s The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, numerous architects, studios, and firms have been inspired by the philosophy of the fold, especially Deleuze’s concepts of pleats of matter, folds of the soul, fluidity of matter, elasticity of bodies, and motivating spirit as a mechanism. In The Fold, Deleuze described a world in which time and space fold, open, and refold along with matter. Objects fold between inner and outer matter in both directions. As a result, objects are

revealed to have no distinction between inside and out. For example, when a façade obtains both structural integrity and materiality, the façade becomes continuous with the spatial structure. In addition, through the fold, time and space become continuous. Among the existing architectural interpretations of Gilles Deleuze’s The Fold, architects have focused mainly on its formal implications. However, besides the topological and formal issues described in The Fold, Deleuze also articulates the quality of spatial

duality that a folding operation can achieve. Despite this, the current engagement with the concept of the fold within architectural practice and discourse is too narrow, since most of these examples primarily focus on techniques of surface folding, origami, topology and so on. As a result, existing projects have not been adequately examined with respect to the spatial experience of folding, which can be leveraged for cultural, political, and architectural consequences.

In The Open City, Richard Sennett states that there are certain qualities that make a city one in which people want to live. Among them, two of the criteria are to “provide cultural stimulation” and to “heal society’s division of race, class, and ethnicity.” As can be observed across urbanization globally, the living environment of individuals changes during one’s life time. Urbanization is an inevitable process experienced globally by humanity. Cities emerge and affect their inhabitants’ way of life and attract people to that city in order

to settle down, becoming part of it. Since each city is unique, the specific conditions of that city influence the possible forms of domesticity. The density of a city, for example, inevitably leads to both the crowding of domestic spaces and a resulting need for social separation. While density places people in proximity to different services and institutions, it also leads to an increased need for privacy, longer transportation times, cultural education issues, and other problems that need to be revaluated, renegotiated, and redesigned. In

other words, the separation of living conditions and locations among different social and economic classes is unhealthy.

Folding Tourism Spots and Education Facilities

Folding Between Education Facilities and Residential Community

174

> >>>>>>>

>>>>>NOW >>>>>NOW THAT THAT MORNING MORNING COMMUTES COMMUTES HAVE HAVE BEEN BEEN DISPLACED DISPLACED IN IN FAVOR FAVOR OF OF WORKING WORKING FROM FROM HOME, HOME, MILLIONS MILLIONS OF OF VEHICLES VEHICLES SIT SIT IDLY IDLY IN IN GARAGES, GARAGES, DRIVEWAYS, DRIVEWAYS, AND AND AT AT THE THE CURB>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> CURB>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

>>>>>> >

>>>>>>>>>MEANWHILE, THE AI THAT GOVERNS OUR TRAFFIC SYSTEMS DREAMS LAZILY OF DAYS GONE BY, WHEN COMMUTERS FLOWED POWERFULLY THROUGH THE REGULATED CONDUITS OF ITS FREEWAYS, ROADS, AND RAIL SYSTEMS>>>>>>>>>>>

>>>>>>WHAT FLOCKS OF ELECTRIC SHEEP ARE CONJURED WITHIN THE ONEIRIC LANDSCAPES OF ITS COMPUTER VISION?

Miri Taple

K U K U vellum

configuration 1

configuration 2

configuration 3

KUKU is 6 individual white coffee tables that can be (re)configured to become one whole. Inspired by the infinity puzzle, it aims to allow the user(s) unlimited freedom in how the tables are organized and ultimately used. Unlimited flexibility, and ephemerality of the tabletop geometry, can be explored â&#x20AC;&#x201D; allowing for a piece of furniture that is not stagnant, but rather possesses a spontaneous, playful nature.

The Japanese term ĺ&#x152;şă&#x20AC;&#x2026; can be defined as small diverse entities that cannot function alone. Architecture can utilize such concepts, demonstrated by KUKU. Individual objects with unique features can come together as a collective and interdependent whole.

drifters kanata yamayoshi // architectural thesis

Fueled by capitalism stemming from the Industrial Revolution, the modern city has become a machine that emphasizes efficient production over human experience. It was intended to correct the “inefficient” elements of the pre-modern city that failed to accommodate production. This was done by rationally segregating individuals and uses into discrete zones, connected by a transportation network that promoted efficient flows of goods and people for the economy. However, this division of people and activities into zones limits the potential of spontaneity and social appropriation. This is problematic because unplanned experiences and encounters that juxtapose the routine and repetitive movement of the citizens are necessary for social awareness. However, architecture can intervene in this condition by developing new urban objects which continually re-organize the city, and thus open it up to new experiences and actions. Introducing free moving elements that destabilize the urban organization will defamiliarize the city, re-engage people in their context and with each other, and make their occupation of the city more conscious and creative and less routine and mechanical. This thesis will demonstrate such an urban condition—one that disrupts the modern city’s organization, rationality, and production with movement, spontaneity, and ephemerality.

T R A N S F O R M AT I O N S FJPTH-01

RSVM-03

CQHU-07

WBIH-02

t o k y o 2 0X X

This thesis project will be sited in Tokyo, Japan, which will be transformed into a new landscape for drifting architecture. It will afford individuality to citizens who live a highly regimented lifestyle, allowing for more freedom and distraction. This will be achieved through the creation of kinetic urban elements that allow individual users to constantly re-author the city’s organization and image – transforming the modern city into what William Mitchell termed a “city of bits.”

PLATFORM DOCK

PROSTHETIC

CHARGING CONDUIT

VIEWING ROOM

AXIS MOTOR

MOBI

LIMBS

ENGINE

D E TA I L VERTICAL ARMATURE

ENGINE

COVER

STORAGE

LIMBS

VENDOR PIVOT WHEEL STAND TOUCHSCREEN

ENGINE CACHE

EXHAUST VENT

ILE HOUSING

LIMBS

INFO HUB

SCREENS

The megacities of today have been designed to function as an efficient machine whose spatial and organizational qualities privilege planned economic productivity over the unplanned and “non-productive” aspects of creative human life. By introducing restrictive zoning, the machine city has neglected the need for impromptu social events. Meanwhile, the introduction of the automobile enabled this transformation of the city, but in so doing also transformed one of the city’s most flexible spaces for social and programmatic appropriation— the street—into a non-space devoted only to a disengaged form of movement. This transformation of the street has created rifts in communities, influenced over-densification, and decreased social opportunities in the city. The urbanity of a city therefore requires interventions that create a sense of place to remedy the negative effects brought about by industrialization. Using Mexico City as a case study, this thesis therefore seeks to employ the infrastructural system of the freeway to reform surrounding communities and rewrite the urban fabric – bringing people together in areas that are socially compromised by the rigidity of the modernist freeway infrastructure, such as areas with homogenous program due to zoning. This type of architecture would be one that travels through the infrastructural freeways of Mexico City, creating a series of layered public spaces for commuters and communities, and exploiting the mobility afforded by the freeway in order to produce a continually relocatable series of urban experiences.

Brianna De leon

cosas raras

el zocalo movil

(The Mobile Zocalo) travels along the outer freeway ring in Mexico City. Along the way there exists a site where one side of the freeway contains multi-residential gated housing, and on the other side is dense single family housing. The freeway here acts as a barrier between different classes. In this area there is also no true public green space. This intervention brings a public social platform to create a temporary space for the people of this area. El Zocalo Movil is also equipped with a fully automated drive-thru for the commuters of the freeways during their long commute times.

vamos a la playa

(Lets go to the Beach!) travels along a 9-mile stretch of freeway in northern Mexico City. This site was chosen because the freeway is located above an existing river, and this area is home to a poor community in the city. Mexico Cityâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s nearest beach is located 4.5 hours away in Acapulco beach, and many residents canâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t afford to go to this tourist destination because they make less than $2 an hour. This intervention provides a mobile beach for the residents in this area and anyone that come into its path. It also contains a car wash to provide a service for the commuters. Vamos a la Playa is supplied by the water from the river, which is recycled within its program.

proye Volador

(Projecto-Drone) travels all over Mexico City, and follows the routes of El Zocalo Movil and Vamos a la Playa to assist in the events taking place on their platforms. It also informs those in the area that the bigger intervention will be there. This intervention features a digital projector that displays movies and images on the panels of the other two interventions and on the side of buildings. Proye Volador is equipped with misting fans to relieve people around the city from the heat, and also provides small amounts of natural shade.

Strange(r)ness Doug Jackson

In 1908 Georg Simmel wrote “The Stranger,”1 in which he disclosed the unique value to a community afforded by the otherness of an individual from outside its bounds. Written after nearly half a century of unprecedented and transformative social, cultural, and technological changes ushered in by the Industrial Revolution and the rise of the modern city, Simmel attempted to discern some virtue to these disruptive consequences of modernity. With burgeoning industry necessitating an unprecedented influx of “strangers” to the city, and with the massive social and urban transformations that ensued, the previously settled life he and his readers had taken for granted had thoroughly been displaced by an overwhelming sense of estrangement. Simmel, like many of his contemporaries, struggled to articulate a silver lining to what must have otherwise seemed like a bewildering and disorienting time. As I write this—sequestered in my house for the past three months due to the coronavirus pandemic; continually shocked by the reprehensible actions and rhetoric of an egomaniacal, misogynist, and racist president who fans the flames of hatred and divisiveness; aghast at the brutal murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer, and reminded once again that this appalling act is only one small glimpse of an insidious and pervasive racism that underpins our society and its cultural practices; wanting desperately to see the resulting protests and other public demonstrations associated with the Black Lives Matter movement lead to revolutionary changes, yet uneasy about the possible surge in Covid-19 cases that might result from these protests—I can think of no time more bewildering, nor more disorienting. *** When I was a child growing up in Southern California in the 1970s, I, like other children of my generation, spent hours in front of the television watching Sesame Street and Villa Alegre. As the writers from both the Children’s Television Workshop and Bilingual Children’s Television intended, I observed and internalized scenes of other children of diverse genders and ethnicities making friends, resolving conflicts, sharing common experiences, and respecting each other’s differences— 1. Georg Simmel, “The Stranger,” in Georg Simmel and Kurt Wolff (trans.), The Sociology of Georg Simmel (New York: Free Press, 1950), 402-408.

modeling a world that the show’s producers knew did not yet exist, but which I naively grew up taking for granted. When we moved to Virginia a few years later, I began elementary school in a school system with a significant African American population, and matriculated through a middle school with an African American principal and then a high school where interracial friendships and couples were common and unremarkable. I saw all of these things through the lens that socially progressive children’s television and the best efforts of my well-meaning parents had constructed for me. However, this was also a period marked by a slow erosion of this aspirational bubble of equity, respect, and understanding that I had grown up mistaking for the actual world. With its position in the Mid-Atlantic coast, and with historical ties to the Confederate south, Virginia, like other states in the region, has both rampant poverty that disproportionately affects minority ethnic groups and a pervasive racism directed at those groups. These conditions are by no means unique to my home state, but rather are shockingly typical conditions across the country— insidiously encoded in the very DNA of our nation, which was founded on the back of slavery, and white male and economic privilege. Whereas I had grown up naively thinking that my and subsequent generations were the lucky inheritors of a world purged of such injustices by the struggles of those individuals and groups of preceding generations that fought for change, my life has been marked by incessant reminders that the world is actually a tempest of competing worlds and worldviews, some acknowledged and others suppressed, some comfortable and others tragic. The world, as a collective and equitable place, does not actually exist. That world is a utopia—one that is often mistaken for the real world. However, life guarantees us that (with increasing regularity, it seems) events occur that place that utopic fantasy in crisis. When this occurs, we realize we are all strangers, in a double sense: we recognize that we come from someplace other than the everyday utopia we have temporarily taken up residence in, yet because of our privileged perspective that confuses that utopia with our everyday experience, we also desperately wish to regard the tainted place we actually live in with the critical distance afforded to the stranger.

Because architecture, in its most basic sense, is a kind of world-making, our discipline is strangely entangled in the politics of this ontological struggle. On the one hand, architects give form to the social and cultural institutions that support many of us, but disenfranchise others. As a profession beholden to these dominant institutions for many of its opportunities to make space in the first place, architecture must acknowledge its own compromised position. This problem is magnified by both the Eurocentric canon and biased narratives that underwrite the education of architects, as well as the lack of diversity among its constituents. Nevertheless, architecture is fundamentally speculative and aspirational—and therefore always maintains the potential to rise to the occasion by envisioning and designing unprecedented spaces and experiences that expand and diversify the world—making it more representative of and meaningful to more individuals. To do so, the architectural discipline is decidedly undisciplined—desperately safeguarding a wellconcealed and often unacknowledged messiness, wherein ideas are continually questioned, discarded or upheld, recycled, or adapted to address the needs, opportunities, and emergent realities of fluid and unpredictable times. Architecture, in the post-classical period anyway, is built for change. It depends on it, and it can also be instrumental to enacting it. While under its seemingly assured and confident rhetoric lies a gnawing doubt, its fundamental inscrutability—its “black box” quality that Reyner Banham once disclosed2—lends architecture an elasticity that allows it to take on new forms, to embody the reality that society needs, and to serve as the basis for the renovation of a culture in response to the exigencies of its time. *** The importance of this flexibility is evident in the way that architects are educated. Despite the many problems associated with architectural education alluded to above, it nevertheless is unique in its discursivity. Architectural education is founded on conversation—both in the everyday back and forth of a desk crit, as well as in the more formal presentation and defense of a design project during a review. And, while it is certainly possible for the institutional power 2. Reyner Banham, “A Black Box: The Secret Profession of Architecture,” in Mary Banham ed., A Critic Writes: Essays by Reyner Banham (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1996), 299. The essay originally appeared in New Statesman and Society, October 12, 1990, pages 22-25. It is tempting, when reading this essay—Banham’s last completed essay, and published posthumously—to compare his final pronouncement on architecture with the expression of sheer horror that accompanies Kurtz’s realization of the groundless principles underlying his own culture at the end of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.

imbalance between students and faculty to result in such discursivity becoming dogmatic, it is nevertheless a pedagogical structure that is fundamentally more open than most. Some institutions double down on this openness by sending their students away during the course of their education, incorporating excursions ranging from short-term travel to longer-term off-campus residencies and study-abroad programs. The Cal Poly Architecture Department is, perhaps, unique in the degree to which it internalizes such externality—devoting much of the fourth year of its five-year curriculum to such opportunities. These experiences allow students to return to campus as strangers to their own institution— in the positive sense that Simmel envisioned, with a critical distance that enables them to be wary of and to possibly even rethink the knowledge they have acquired in the curriculum up to that point. The inclusion of a thesis as the concluding experience in an architectural curriculum is another means by which some institutions, such as Cal Poly, demonstrate a commitment to affording students the experience of architecture’s continual need for its own othering. Students are asked to formulate an architectural argument that acknowledges and interrogates a lineage of architectural discourse and practice, to develop new ideas and techniques based on this argument, to demonstrate these ideas and techniques within a design project, and to defend their position and design project in the face of reasonable objection. As a result of this experience, and the recognition of the continual need to redefine architecture’s role and to defend the value of such a redefinition, thesis students are confronted with a fundamental truth about architecture that our discipline takes pains to obscure: that the nature and value of architecture is neither absolute, nor absolutely verifiable. Rather, its virtues and values are debatable and ultimately unstable. This instability is, ironically, one of the architectural discipline’s greatest virtues. While its ability to appear certain and inevitable lends power and relevance to its works, its contrary drive to interrogate, challenge, and redefine the very principles upon which this work is

based affords it the aforementioned flexibility to engage the manifold and evolving aspects of reality—social, cultural, technological, political, and others. This allows it to reformulate those aspects into new representations of the world, which virtualize the possibility of new experiences that address the problems and opportunities of the present moment in the hopes of affording a better future. *** The undisciplined nature of the architectural discipline means that, hopefully, its students are not quite disciples. Nevertheless, it is a discipline that is coherent enough to see and recognize itself as such, to discern its potential to make meaningful contributions to the world, and to be invested in giving realistic hope to those that pursue it that they will have the opportunity and means to actually do so. I feel so fortunate to have been able to teach in the 5th year of our curriculum at Cal Poly, precisely because it is the area of our curriculum where such hope is cultivated—and ultimately justified—through the myriad ambitious, articulate, and compelling thesis projects that are developed through the passionate and tireless work of our students. My students this year have fearlessly engaged such complex and challenging concerns as: the multitudinous nature of contemporary culture; play as a means for transcending entrenched ideological differences; post-anthropocentric thought and its potential to afford new spaces and new narratives that displace those that underpin technological instrumentality, colonial oppression, and environmental degradation; the political potential of novel aesthetics arising from the engagement of spatial and temporal dimensions that fall outside of humanity’s normal frame of reference, and which reflect our entanglement in such inscrutable realms as global space and geologic time; new conceptions of the city that address the legacy of social problems that have arisen from modern city planning’s emphasis on social and programmatic compartmentalization, and its transformation of the street from a space of negotiation to one dedicated to the efficient flows of capital; and the development

of form and space which affords the potential of new social and cultural practices that are more diverse, inclusive, and empowering. They have tackled these issues with a rigor and sophistication that is truly admirable, and which belies the relatively short amount of time that has transpired during their education. It is, frankly, astounding to observe the amount of growth that they have exhibited in just five years—and to consider the jaw-dropping potential this represents as one extrapolates their trajectories forward into the future. The diversity of this work is another of its many virtues. Besides encouraging the discursivity described above that is necessary to ensure architecture’s openness, it also underscores the plurality of architecture’s possible performances that is enabled by such openness—and which is crucial to its ability to effectively engage the many challenges, opportunities, and subjectivities that it aspires to address. The world they are entering into as young architects is a particularly challenging one. It has always been so, but it is, in this moment, plain to see in all of its raw ugliness. It is a world of strangers, mutually entangled in one another’s worlds, whose differences may never be capable of being permanently reconciled into a unified whole. Rather, these differences more likely require the re-making of our collective spaces, again and again, into new and different spaces—in order to adequately redress the harm experienced by those who are marginalized, underrepresented, or outright oppressed. Yet, architecture is a discipline that always wants to be different. And it is, after all, in its embrace of this difference, and its ability to give form to such difference, that architecture is ultimately capable of making a difference.