Odd Blocks

This project explored a series of possible bar aggregations as the platform for further development into an architectural project.

Initial explorations dealt specifically with the issue of the center. How might abstract aggregations of geometric primitives begin to speak to the architectural ramifications of displaced or misregistered centers?

Given the eventual typological goal of the project to be a single family home, how could inferences into the center begin to offer programmatic or formal manipulations on our understanding of centerhood which might speak to the political and social ramifications of altering the default condition of how we arrange our homes?

For each object, a ground plane was also developed which furthered the concepts at hand in the massing. Throughout the series, a theme of awkwardness and misfitting came forward as a means by which the formal legibility of the bar typology could be read against the static nature of a ground. Filleted edges and strange alignments prompted questions of legibility. Does one see three intersected bars which avoid one another or four bent bars that entangle?

Explorations of multiple centers began to entice a displacement of the center. Rather than a singular void, the multiple involution of the massing onto itself allows a distinctly difficult reading of the overall form. Filigree adjustments in filleting and massing allow further difficulties in immediate reading to be introduced.

Object 1: Obscured Center

The first in the series of explorations took as its fundamental starting point a seemingly unresolvable cluster of boxes, jumbled together such that each attenuates to the next only through slight deviations in alignment and orientation.

In the process of reconciling these differences, there emerges a necessity to establish a hierarchy of geometry. Those surfaces which slip into or break away from their neighbors begin to construct a formal reading of the object that addresses both its underlying geometric formulations and overall formal reading.

The massing uses the dislocated character of its relationship to its ground in section to create an uneven, human-made terrain that nonetheless speaks to the haphazardness of a foundsite, parsed by gently rolling ridges and crisp, edge-like ravines.

Through its manipulation of ground, the geometries of the massing project out a certain degree of the inner complexities of its formal relationships. Slippages of vectors, edges and planes from the massing at times address the articulation of its form while at others contrasting, producing a series of cantilevers, subtle dislocations along corners and uneven ground planes.

Object 2: Absence of Center

Alternatively, another study focused less on the production of complexity through multiplication, insteading working on the obfuscation of reading through a minimal number of parts.

Given a relatively low degree of formal articulation, how might exceedingly subtle geometrical maneuvers begin to decompose the expectations that we might have approaching a particular object? In its tripartite organization, we might from afar encounter it with a particular breadth of familiarity. We expect certain edges to align, certain spaces to unfold before us.

But again, the use of very slight changes in the meeting points between surfaces and volumes begins to problematize these games of joinery. The dislocation of a volume from its landscape or the ambiguity of a projection of one volume into another make readings difficult in so far as they belie the standards of architectural form, those systems of resolution that we expect when resolving the formal qualities of a mass.

Object 3: Deep Center

A theme that emerges across the various studies is one of the simultaneous implementation of complex and primitive forms. Where masses collide, the level of articulation naturally increases. Yet still, those spaces further from the center of such manipulations intentionally remain almost "unarticulated", bare rectangular volumes projecting out into their landscape.

This juxtaposition establishes a self-serving relationship of comparison. We begin to understand the complexity not sui generis but as product of the interaction between many simpler geometries. These constructive geometries are moreover made brazenly apparent, a choice on the part of the designer to leave their presence as a formative factor long after their role as geometric foundations for the complexity of the object's center has been worked over.

Object 4: Complex Centers

In some cases, the operations undergone to arbitrate the various forms into one another elicit not one but two, separate centers. This works in two ways: the centers pull at one another, making difficult the process of reading hierarchy while simultaneously weilding a wholistic central space, one defined not in its singularity but by its relationship to various parts.

This overwrought center further begins to extend, through the use of blended alignments of surface and carefully crafted seams, the reading of the mass. Its vectors pull the edges of surface outwards, communicatively bridging the formal expression of an intricate center with more primitive, straightforward wings on the periphery of the mass.

This interaction is a highly calibrated composition of parts that seeks to flatten the linear relationship between center and edge. In as much as the center remains an identifiable whole, its constituent parts remain as extensions of its enlarged interstitial space, vestiges of a set of formulaic operations undergone to resolve subtly colliding geometries.