Portfolio by Sara Dean

SARA DEAN SELECTED WORKS

STORMGLASS with Ply Architecture

THE AESCLEPIUS MACHINA with Adams + Gilpin Studio

THE KIND OF MAYBE-MAYBE OF THE NOT-NOT for Jason Young

DIGITAL STEAMBENDING with Mankouche, Bard and Ng

FUTURES OF HYPERCOMPLEXITY for Architecture + Adaptation

ANECDOTED CITY with 1/X

STAINLESSNESS for ANEXACT

BAD INFINITY with MS_DR studio

LOOSE EDGES AND CLAIMS ON THE STREET for BASE , Beijing, China

LINE, NO LINE with Melinda Rouse

NANGAO / BEIGAO with BASE, Beijing, China

STORMGLASS WITH PLY ARCHITECTURE

I worked in 2010-2011 on Stormglass for Ply Architecture. The project is a material investigation of glass, transparency, and weather mapping. My capacity in this project was to develop a fabrication process for the installation of a vertical wall of aggregated glass tubes. The wall has a double curvature, and I developed, through CATIA, models to create a relational logic between the tubes so that they could overlap to create density without running into each other. The appearance of effortless curvature is the result of this devleopment, combining the rigidity of the tubes with the geometry of the torched ellipse.

digital models so that the tubes were kept at a precise distance from each other for stuctural and aesthetic consideration. This combination of high and low tech solutions, between analogue and digital technology, was very informative in the resulting form and aesthetic.

* all drawings and imagery courtesy of Ply Architecture

At the same time as we were using parametric modeling for the tube aggregation, we were investiging ancient rope lashing techniques for tube assembly. These lashing techniques informed the 3

The fabrication of the wall was an orchestration. Some of the tubes were filled with a solution that changed in response to weather conditions. The wall is comprised of aggregated glass, hanging over the space, and lashed to acrylic ribs as the tubes were assembled.

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6 Formal Explorations: Ruled Surfaces

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basic form: identical circles basic form: identical circles

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basic form: ellipse + spiral

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Formal Explorations: Ruled Surfaces 7

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ASCLEPIUS MACHINE WITH ADAMS + GILPIN STUDIO

THE ASCLEPIUS MACHINE is an ongoing research project of Robert Adams of Adams + Gilpin Studio on the social and aesthetic potentials of disability culture in the public sphere. I have worked on this project as a Research Designer for Robert Adams since 2009. The project utilizes medical technologies at an architectural scale, which has given me the opportunity to develop innovative hybrid material systems; kinetic pneumatic muscles used for a reactive envelope; infrared sensors utilized for detectable environments.

experience in project management, as I managed the coordination of material and fabrication for multiple exhibits and publications, including the prototyping of an operational model of a responsive ramp and enclosure for exhibit and as a working model for the development of structural, pneumatic and electrical system details. The project has exhibited in Michigan, California and Seoul, Korea, where it was a finalist in the Design For All Competition in 2010.

Working on this project has also given me 13

MEMBRANE AND FINS

PNEUMATIC ARTIFICIAL MUSCLES

SENSOR INTERFACE

STRUCTURAL FRAME

RAMP SURFACE

THE KIND OF MAYBE-MAYBE OF THE NOT-NOT FOR JASON YOUNG

This book was designed and produced as a commission by Jason Young to present his extensive and dispersive research on the city of Detroit over the last 15 years. This content had not previously been shown together, and I prioritized the communication of the research through the format of the book as well as the polemical position of the construction and formatting of the book to be in conversation with the research without overshadowing the content. The book was constructed for and shown at the Venice Biennale in Architecture in 2012.

DIGITAL STEAM BENDING WITH MANKOUCHE, BARD, AND NG

DIGITAL STEAM BENDING is a faculty research project conducted at the University of Michigan. It centered on the potentials of steam bent wood processes of furniture making when translated to the scale of architecture. My contribution to this project was in the development of techniques that moved between physical and digital development. Physically, I developed techniques for steaming, jigs to aid in finding form and material limitations, and human processes to maximize success in the bending process. Digitally, I used the physical limitation tests to create parametric wishbone wishbone models in CATIA that would find new potentials of aggregation and individual form.

is hbmultiple boonnee awards, i sh The project hasww won including the BSA Unbuilt Architecture Award and Architectâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Research + Design Award. The project is permanently w is h b oofn eMichiganâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s installed at the University Botanical Gardens.

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FUTURES OF HYPERCOMPLEXITY FOR ARCHITECTURE + ADAPTATION

Futures of Hypercomplexity is a travelling exhibit highlighting the ongoing research of Architecture + Adaptation in Jakarta, Indonesia. I designed and fabricated the show with an emphasis on speeds of engagement and adaptability to multiple galleries. Materially, it is comprised of seven tables and two projected diptics. The tables when positioned together form a partial map of the city of Jakarta, with six sites highlighted as sites of research and intervention. Below the map are drawings, diagrams and text outlining the research, connecting the geographic site to the paradigmatic sites of work, on topics such as coastal infill, canal flooding, potable water distribution and vegetative energy. The tables are underlit, illuminating the drawings and the sites, and creating seven glowing objects in a dimly lit gallery.

variations of architecture and its operations among cities with a common crisis? The exhibition argues for tendentious solidarities and new strategic alliances between designers and the urban poor. Our contention is that the future of hypercomplexity in Southeast Asian megacities will witness either a reification of political economic divisions between the extremely affluent and the neglected urban poor, or, as our work suggests, begin to develop new affinities between urban researchers, architects, landscape architects and the urban poor to challenge the inequalities of resource availability, unequal exposure to environmental risks and benefits, and urban health and wellbeing.

The exhibition – Futures of Hypercomplexity – responds to several urgent questions: What is the agency of architecture in megacities that are facing severe inundation? In what forms do architecture and design “appear” within compositions of hypercomplexity? And, what are the 31

CONFIGURATION 1: Tables together, emphasizing the continuity of the city map

CONFIGURATION 2: Tables aligned by apart, allowing closer examination of the research drawings

CONFIGURATION 3: Workshop configuration, for conversation in the gallery around a common area.

ANECDOTED CITY: DETROIT WITH 1/X AND SALT&CEDAR PRESS

Anecdoted City is an exhibition and archive which maps a city in collaboration with local citizens through objects and their associated stories of personal or collective meaning. The objects that make up daily life are the material of place and memory; individually, they are totems and private stories to those who keep them, but collectively, they can begin to tell a story of a place, to sketch out what a place used to be, what it is now, and what it hopes to become. Beginning in Detroit, Anecdoted City prioritizes places with shifting gravities, cities whose identities were historically rooted in rapidly declining or changing industries. These kinds of cities tend to be pulled into the same narratives of decay, glossing over the complexity and richness of the citiesâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; culture in favor of a more straightforward parable of North American industrial decline. Anecdoted City provides a platform for the communities it targets, a democratic space for both the metropolitan citizenry and outside voices to create links between past and present through resident-chosen objects, building a collective image of a place that refl ects its exuberance.

The goal of Anecdoted City as a larger project is to create a unique crowd sourced collection for each of a series of American cities. Once assembled, these collections will be documented and disseminated with the aim of enriching the contemporary identities of these urban centers in North America. We are currently seeking collaborators in a few select cities to join us in mounting local editions of Anecdoted City. In Detroit, the show ran as a highlighted part of the Detroit Design Festival 2012 and in conjunction with the Eastern Market After Dark event. The opening was attended by over 500 people, and it was written about in the Huffington Post and many local Detroit blogs. Anecdoted City is currently looking for venues in other American cities.

STAINLESSNESS FOR ANEXACT STUDIO

SCOPE The design of a book, and the packaging for the book and accompanying maps, in conjunction with the exhibition of the project, Stainlessness. Three books were produced. The books were hand-stitched and bound and the packaging constructed by Leon Johnson, now of Salt and Cedar. The book was developed in as a connection between the styles of the academic paperback journal and the atlas or map archive.

MS_DR POP-UP EXHIBITION FRIDAY APRIL 6 - WEDNESDAY APRIL 11 Duderstadt Digital Media Commons Gallery OPENING: 3 - 5 PM SATURDAY APRIL 7

BAD

Brad Smith _ Charlie Veneklase _ Janet Yoon _ Jessica

SCOPE The development of an exhibit of research work for ten projects around a common theme, that of Bad Infinity, Hegelâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s notion of the perpectuation of urbanism. The exhibit was designed, curated, promoted and produced as a collective effort of the authors of the work. I worked extensively on the overall concept and use of the space, as well as the specifics of the hardware and structure of the elements. I also prodcued all of the graphics for the exhibit.

BAD INFINITY POP-UP EXHIBIT

INFINITY

a Hester _ Jonathan LeJune _ Keith Peiffer _ Melinda Rouse _ Sara Dean _ Scott SĂ¸rli _ Valeria Federighi

PERPETUAL PERPETUATION

GLITCH, THE NEW MONUMENT

Bad Infinity is best seen at 30mph and in 72dpi. The landscape burns of gestural repetition. Fluorescent buzz and flicker mark time. The sound of the abandoned house is the low battery beep of the smoke detector. Logistical space establishes itself as a new aesthetic. Weak space leaves room for infrastructural amplification. Absence presences itself forcefully. Normalcy becomes a deceptive action, hiding covert and banal operations equally â&#x20AC;&#x201D; the drainage ditch and the revolution. Bad Infinity captures material artifacts as emblems and indicators of perpetual perpetuation.

Running the 100-ft print pushes the system beyond capacity, giving the technology unexpected agency. The glitch contaminates the process, questioning our expectation of the digital file. Bad Infinity embraces the glitch as the moment that foregrounds possibility over projected outcome. The physical print becomes a mediated representation of the digital. At the scale of the pixel, the glitch indicates file formats and digital resolution; at the scale of the drawing site, machinic defaults and tendencies; at the scale of the gallery, tropes of orthographic perception and sensory comfort. 47

The space is structured by a 100 foot drawing, suspended from the ceiling and snaking back and forth, undermining the normative gallery vantage point and creating pockets of space through which to view the work. The drawing is printed on backlit PVC film, which is lit from within the pockets created by the folded drawing by fluorescent tube lighting. The drawing also defines the space behind it, creating three distinct spaces, 50

which are utilized for three video loops crafted for the exhibition by Jonathan LeJune. The videos are viewed in front of the fluorescents, and embody three takes on digital urban infinity. The first is the twitter feed of the group work housed under the hashtag msdr. The second is a curation of youtube videos inspiring the ten projects, and the third is a auto-tune of a google doc that was jointly written by the ten authors, which consists of a lexi-

con of digital urbanism written over time. This type of collaborative work on ten singularly authored projects is the spirit that directed the production of this show, and the spirit embedded in the work represented in it.

CLAIMS ON THE STREET: LOOSE EDGES AND ACCUMULATIONS IN CHINA’S URBAN VILLAGES

This project is the product of research conducted in Beijing on the street condition of the city’s Urban Villages. These villages are legally not connected to Beijing but have been enveloped by the expansion of the city. They straddle and combine urban and rural and are currently being demolished to allow for the further expansion of Beijing. This work looks at the qualities of this environment and the priorities of urbanism unique to this moment in Beijing. An intervention is proposed in Caochangdi, an urban village neighboring Beijing’s 5th Ring Road. Caochangdi is under threat of demolition due to its proximity to a newly proposed business district. It is also unique in its incorporation of an internationally renowned artists community within the village. Living in Caochangdi, I closely examined the structure of the street as a place of social, civic and architectural fabric. These streets are

urban in their flexibility and temporality of purpose, changing hourly and seasonally to accommodate the congestion of activity that is asked of them without individual ownership or conflict. Proposed is an intervention that utilizes the research into the social and commercial utility of the street and translates it into structured implications in an architecture through circulation, proportion and social engagement with the space. It examines the implications of civic structure in the Urban Village and proposes a civic architecture that develops from this study of the street.

SITE CONDITION

WALL / BENCH / CHOPPING BLOCK / COAL SHED / TABLE / STORAGE / PARKING SPOT / CAFE SEATING / PLAYGROUND / CONSTRUCTION STAGING / PORCH / TRASH DUMP

Accentuating Public Domestication Public space used for private or family activities, especially when in the context of one room dwellings in the village. This role of the street can be enhanced through actions that entice leisure activities of the home or ownership of the street.

Entrepreneurial Attracter Localized commerce and entrepreneurship are both embedded in Chinese culture and a new post-Maoist phenomenon. Streets, house-fronts and parks are active market sites. The ability of a site to adapt to vending carts, seller stands and service rigs are part of the requirements of a street in Beijing.

Dispersive Influence

sites. This diffusion can represent the disbursement of objects, concepts or activities.

Momentary Experience As the lengths of an era and a moment speed up in China, the ability to capture the present becomes more difficult. With Caochangdiâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s future unclear, an attempt is made to solidify the experience of this place and time.

Claiming Ground Ownership state in the land is one of the defining legal characteristics of a Chinese village. Ways of activating that privilege on the street reinforce the difference between the village and the city in the time when the decision is being made in the village or for the village whether it will become part of the city or not.

The diffusion of the site(s) into the village through relocation of portable components, copies of site strategies, or spilling of site activities into nearby

LINE, NO LINE

The border is understood as a line. The border between the United States and Mexico is visualized as the infinitely thin vector of the geopolitical separation of the nation states. The simplicity of this understanding of the line defeats other thicker registers of this border. The line works as a cultural mediator, defining sided-ness through the otherness we expect to recognize if the line were crossed. Working away from the line, artifacts of the border as a social mediator amplify physical and cultural representations of it. They equally protect and defend the efficacy of the border while expanding the territory of the line into a cultural impact of verification - a line that is sometimes a line and sometimes not a line. Line No-Line is a project that supplements itself. The book represents the physical presence of the border through its physical walls and political territories. The set of cards are artifacts of the line that work away from the line. Each component is incomplete. Although they do not indicate their relationship, the accumulation of these multiple understandings of the border mark the same territory of mediation. The performance of surveillance extends the threshold of the border, beyond the line, to encompass the surrounding desert terri足tory. It is in this extended threshold that the social space of the border is enacted, imply足ing a concrete spatial delineation that does not materially exist.

The apparent fixity of the border serves as a site of invention, a discrete element serv足ing as resistance for quick, adaptable lo-fi systems.

HEYDAY BREAKING orchestrates Pontiac, Michigan through a series of figures, events, and narratives. These interventions work to destabilize the present site priorities and reterritorialize possible futures. The post-heyday condition of Pontiac is the catalyst for the moments and systems that are enacted as priming vehicles, setting situations, priorities, and timescales that reimagine the present. The interventions team up to uncover and reconfigure the economic, cultural, and social agency of heyday in order to open up other possibilities for reading the city. Pontiac, Michigan is a paradigmatic site of the American heyday. Heyday here is not seen only as a positive, productive moment, but also as a resulting stagnation through the memory of success. The heyday eliminates other possible futures through its ability to function. Pontiac is a representation of the American heyday as both a benefactor and a victim. The 66

HEYDAY BREAKING: PRIMING POSSIBLE FUTURES IN PONTIAC

idea of the ‘come back story’ is a way of victimizing other configurations and priorities in a place like Pontiac. Heyday breaking becomes a positive moment of anticipated futures. As a mode of action, the American heyday is broken into four ‘heydays in play’: the autonomous town, the factory city, middle class homeownership and car culture. Pontiac is in bankruptcy management, losing their autonomy to a state agent. Civil agencies, like the planning department and the police force, have been dismantled. The factories that drove the local economy have all closed. A prominent assembly plant on Woodward Ave. was demolished three years ago. The Pontiac car brand has been discontinued. The majority owner-occupied housing stock has dropped over 50% over the last two years, becoming a non-valued commodity. Pontiac, Michigan is on one hand a symbol of American ingenuity

and prosperity. It is precisely this success of the heyday that is located as a source of current stagnation. Site priming and rumor are utilized as actionable response systems. Three priming interventions set up new territories in Pontiac that allow work on the city outside of American heyday and enable other spatial priorities for intervention. They utilize projective time and public response as a way of respatializing the city. These weave together, orchestrating the city through networked events and spatial moments.

Woodward Avenue is ground-zero of the American automobile industry. It was the first paved road in the country. It connects Pontiac and Detroit in a direct path that includes the demolished factory lots of Pontiac with the Highland Park plant and downtown Detroit. Here the staging of the annual Dream Cruise brings residents out to watch Woodward Avenue for a weekend of tailgating as the American automobile is paraded in a continuous loop from Detroit to Pontiac.

The Pontiac Assembly Plant, formerly the revolutionary Wilson Foundry, was shut down in 2009 and demolished. The site stands as an emblem of Pontiacâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s stagnant economy and past glory. The massive flat site is tipped to create a stage-set of the lot. A contract is struck to store construction equipment on the site to counter the stagnation of the siteâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s current non-use and rumor the usefulness of the construction industry in Pontiac, now absent from the city.

Downtown Pontiac is more parking lot than building, as the maintenance of the land has become unmanageable to landowners. Construction netting and scaffolding holds the street and creates rumor in the build up to the Pontiac public land auction. The whiff of construction also images the memory of density in the downtown area, far gone from the current reality.

John Brinkley is summoned for his ability to project confident healer as he injected patients with colored water and graphed goat testicles to men seeking virility. His celebrity created great patient loyalty and an enthusiastic following. The event schedule is used to curate anticipation and discovery. The self-fulfilling prophesy of the placebo is taken for its skill as future-makier. The plan, not the result, is the urban artifact, the intervention.

AGGREGATE URBANISM TRANS-APPARENT CONDITIONING

A collection of skirmishes into both the digital and franchise landscape, these one-offs add up to a series of takes on the aggregate quality of our spatial and informational interactions.

logic of the aggregate. Learning from the aggregate digital experience, the work suggests interventions that emphasize system vernacular and opportunism.

Working on the aggregate condition as we encounter it both in our digital experienc as well as our urban experience, in the thin landscapes of our franchise and sprawl spaces, these one-offs work on how architecture can learn from the

The formats of photography, video, field notebook, poster, and architectural drawing are taken as sites of intervention, through which the landscape is presented, manipulated, idealized, calculated and turked. 77

Utopian plagiarisms of Tschumiâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s canonical Advertisements for Architecture, the images have been replaced with photographs taken of the big box landscape. The resulting images question the role of big box construction in the discipline of architecture.

The field notebook is redesigned for the surveying and documentation of the franchise landscape. A template is designed to accommodate the documentation of the platform oriented space of the landscape; parking lots, multilane roads, turning radii, interior aisle layouts, and shelving. These are overlaid on each other, resulting in a patterned notebook for use in the franchise landscape.

Part of a series of photographic images of the franchise landscape. The images have been manipulated to emphasize the qualities of the space; flatness, blankness, squareness, and thinness.

TRANS-APPARENT STRATEGIES: OPPORTUNISTIC ARCHITECTURE The franchise landscape has proliferated for half a century, but it isn’t until now, with the ubiquity of participatory digital platforms, that we are able to see it as an architectural act, with attributes on its own terms. The franchise landscape, with its predictable experiences and performative spaces, is an ideal physicality of digital platform space. Frameworks allow for endless zero-resistance recombination within a directive aesthetic of directional markings, shed structures and turning radii that all ‘fit’ through their recognizability as formally performative and experientially similar. The digital platform spaces operate similarly. YouTube is a framework for files of certain formats, apathetic to content and motivation, but predictive in experience and reading through markers of the platform: related content, views, comments, likes and dislikes. Most of our experience of digital media is now in this realm: aggregated content from institutional and individual sources, organized in a loose configuration that seems to fit regardless of location, proximity or directive. The apparency of these systems, both digital and physical, is their agency. The appearance of transparency gives us the ability to occupy their specifics as gestures of the system. We participate in their gestural indications and are able to gauge importance or meaning of content through aesthetic similarity and indexical cues. The apparency covers any opportunistic or covert subjectivity through the foil of similarity and the ability for the content to assimilate to the system seamlessly. Faux leaks, such as Debbie Loves Cats or Shirley Sherrod’s Speech are able to hide in plain sight on YouTube through aesthetic convention of the amateur video. Long cuts, poor lighting and pixelization stand in as gestures of the unproduced, authentic video. The ability to utilize platform frameworks through aesthetic or performative similarity untethers the apparency of the system from the opportunism of the content. This unhinging of medium and message utilizes apparencies and gestures in order to plant inevident excesses in the system. The uncanny nature of the result works trans-apparently to gain the agency of the systems behind the content or intervention. The actors in these platforms, the architects of the aesthetically similar, are seen as acting subordinately to the system. Mechanical turk is a term used to speak of human agents working in aid of a computational system, performing low grade tasks that resist automation. The term can be traced to a famous automaton of the same name from the 1700s. The original Mechanical Turk was a mechanical chess master that travelled Europe beating the social elite of the time, including Benjamin Franklin and Napoleon Bonaparte. The Turker though was not the machine, though, but a man hidden in the cabinet. The dwarf, or ‘little hunchback’, as he is described in various accounts, gains agency through the spectacle of the automaton. The dwarf plays Napoleon through the spectacle of the Mechanical Turk. And Napoleon, in turn, is unable to resist the temptation of playing the machine, so apparent is the mechanism of the automaton, with its hinged arms, cranks and levers of operation. Debbie Loves Cats author hartmanncara turks YouTube through the apparency and spectacle of the video in the same way that the dwarf turks Napoleon through the apparency and spectacle of the machine. These methods can be utilized in the physical environment as well. The apparency and spectacle of the franchise landscape is 84

prime for turkers. Using the performative predictability of the space, excesses, uncannies and double stories can easily operate without disrupting the apparency of the system. The assumption of economic benefit and functionality of figures in the franchise landscape are ways in to the turker in the form of architect or architecture. I have identified four such performative typologies which lend themselves to inevident intervention in the franchise landscape. Invisible Figures pervade in the space without visual perception; infrastructural boxes, ballards, grates, drainage culverts, dumpsters and sheds are all figural and odd individually, but in the context of the franchise landscape they become camouflage, not for their ability to blend in but for our inability to notice them. Drive Thru / Fill Up is defined by the performance of driving a car in a predictive path and interacting through of the driverâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s side window. As a service, they are commonly used for dispensing money, food, pharmaceuticals, gasoline, and pressurized air, and receiving trash, mail, books and videos. Vehicular Poche includes all surfaces that are not truckable. This is made of predictive indicators such as curbed surfaces raised by six inches, ballards, barracades, retaining walls, guard rails and temporary chains. Rentable Surfaces is composed of all surfaces which are accessible through rental. These range in scale and territory from the advertising space on the back of sales receipts to shopping cart sides to park bench backs to bus stop walls to truck sides to billboards. Where the architectural intervention is generally seen as a singular and justifiable moment, in platform space is has attributes more akin to multiplicity, congruity, and predictability. Subjects become subjectivities in this environment. When ISA (Infinity So Awesome) released his fad dance Movin Like Berney through an internet dance competition, he moved the dance from a localized club subject to a world subjectivity. The Bernie, a dance based on the movements of the zombie in the 80s movie Weekend at Bernies, became a way to inhabit a space through broadcast participation. Walmarts, teenagers bedrooms, cafeterias and malls are seen through the intervention of the Bernie to the space. The subjects are â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;in the sceneâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; through the broadcast of their participation. They are not subjects, in that they are not part of a particular audience or type, the Bernie instead is a subjectivity that they map on themselves. Chinese kids doing calisthenics to the Bernie is similar to sorority hazings in WalMart is similar to flash mob Bernie in a high school cafeteria is similar to a teenager in Kansas doing the Bernie in his bedroom. All become related content, and all are validated as participants without heirarchy as subjects, but through their ability to heighten the reach of the Bernie through broadcast. This type of intervention adds a Territorial Overlay to the space. Products can be seen similarly as subjectivities - as raw material of added complexity. Instead of the space itself gaining complexity through intervention, the understanding of the space gains complexity. The Snuggie Retrofit moves the Snuggie from a blanket with arms to the arming of an object. It moves the Snuggie from a subject to a subjectivity. Fad products often have this subjectivity affect in themselves. The turker moves in this environment seeing the loose edges and opportunities that the system leaves open. The franchise interior is a space to be engaged through objects with flat bottoms and die cut holes. In this space, a ball has a flat bottom. Anything that meets the criteria can engage the product landscape with zero-resistance. The parking lot is a space of directionality and markings, understood and accessible through the car at low speeds and pedestrian circulation. It can be understood as places of speed and stopping, places of truckability and vehicular poche. The turker finds ways of engaging the system outside of its assumed service while within its aesthetic; using the system against itself as a means of access and inherited agency. 85

FLAT BOTTOM INTERFACE MAXIMUM PACKAGING HEIGHT

HOOK AND POLE INTERFACE

From a series of drawings investigating the platform logics of sites of varying scales in the franchise landscape. The sites included: the infrastructural box, the drainage ditch, the drive thru, the parking lot median and, pictured, the big box aisle.

NANGAO / BEIGAO FOUR TAKES ON BEIJING’S URBAN VILLAGES

In 2010, while I was studying at BASE Beijing in the urban village of Caochangdi, a notice went out to the township announcing the demolition of five of its ten villages. This notice spurred a three month on-the-ground research project documenting two sister villages in the township, Nangao and Beigao. The project was proposed and conducted by myself and three other students. The resulting book is comprised of four takes on the villages: compensation logistics, urban village economies, material streams and village futures. The research was conducted through interviews with residents, photographic documentation, the collection of reading

material, and field mapping. Resident interviews resulted in new questions and locations of interest, which would be followed. The project evolved as reactions to these first hand accounts and documentation. Interviews weren’t considered accurate or inaccurate; they were taken as part of the cultural narrative of the urban villages. Beigao’s demolition resulted in Nangao’s population explosion. These were investigated in tandem, producing a double read of the life and temporality of the villages.

TWO-INCH ADVANTAGE

Two-Inch Advantage explores contestational design as subversion through the use of ubiquitous technologies and simple solutions. Adopting the staging of a conversation as an opportunity in which to investigate the spatial politics of power, this project operates on a condition hidden in plain sight, the seat cushion. The assumption of manufactured similarity of chairs is taken on as a site of potential agency. The addition of two-inches of height to the standard conference chair works in a no-fi way on the spatial relationships found in this standard conference arrangement. The transparency of the act and the unassuming status of the chair cushion (the two inches of augmented height were in no way concealed) nonetheless operate on the conversation, either as an equalizer, balancing participants of differing stature, or as an assertion of power, as the addition height imposes the perception of a power position. In the staging of the cushions, they were planted in a randomized way at the conversation table. A fabric was chosen to approach the aesthetic of the original seat cushion, a heavy matte-black cotton, as was the construction. The bottom of the applied two-inch cushion was cinched to the base of the chair to approximate the connection of the original cushion to the base. In this way the planted cushions were authenticated in their total inability to call attention to themselves. They defied the garnering of attention to the care of design or craft usually directed at an object. 93