Open Research Office  |  Lucas V. Almássy  Architecture, Landscape, and The City Experiments, Investigations, and Speculations  |  2025






“Please Don’t Go, Just Stay”
The Aesthetics of Stillness

I - The Parking Lot
Close your eyes and think of a parking lot in the middle of nowhere, after barreling through space with a 2-ton metal pod, the enormous power. Gas stations, snacks of salt and sugar, spent oil and hot asphalt. There is a fatal error in the way we step out of our cars. We instill a very specific persona into space: one of Stillness. As we step out of the automobile, after having run towards or away from something, we need to recover.

II - The Park In Tears
I believe a place on the side of the road can sing the strongest if it feels like it's saying something to us:  "Please don't go, Stay."  This crying out can be instilled in the lamp posts, trash cans, bathrooms, sinks, benches, tables, and the trees. A yearning for humanity. These elements of a park should be begging to us, on their hands and knees, crying.

III - The Aesthetics of Stillness
Combatting the mad rush of life with a healing frequency, adjustments to the environment around us can make the landscape more comfortable and more attuned to the diverse needs of humans on the road. The primary mission of this project is to keep people in the landscape for as long as possible. That is the metric. The metric is how comfortable, how inviting, and how interesting this place is and how successful the architecture is in helping people enjoy and find wordless affirmations for life. 

IV - Every Step Is Different
The first step towards building places that foster stillness is to make every surface interesting to look at, touch, sit on, and feel. Let us not design with too broad a stroke. Every moment is different and therefore design with an organic frame of mind.  Believe in centers, growing out from a center and assuming meaning in found objects and amplifying the many radiating centers that respond to the desire for difference and diversity.

V - Park As A Public Studio
Art practice is the future. Artists and craftsmen ought to be able to do work anywhere. Musicians, sculptors, painters, chefs, and dancers, singers, hobbies of every kind imaginable. Things done as ends in themselves. Infrastructure ought to be giving that out to others. We need Parks and Recreation to proliferate across archipelagos of housing. A world of competing campuses.

April 19, 2025  9:00pm | Cambridge, MA
The Demolition of Pruitt-Igoe, 1972. U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development

 An Interpretation of Deconstructivism
Design As Protest

The Aftershock of Post-War Dreams
The ashes of the September 11th attacks, the ides of the Nazi regime aesthetic, and the collapse of Pruitt Igoe housing projects, signals a cultural fracture in modern industry’s promise of social cohesion and equality. The gap between the ideal and the real is growing ever wider. The modern condition has had a confusing effect on us. 

The False Productivity of Alienation
Rather than fighting the alienation we are oppressed with, we often, particularly in youth, accept, welcome, and promote alienation as a productive human condition. In youth there can be a tendency to design with a love for destabilization, disturbance, disjunction, and fragmentation. This alientation, however, is just the beginning of a new value system ushered in my the ideas of deconstructivism in architecture.

Dwelling as Translation
To be deconstructivist is to be defiant towards traditional ways of life. We now adore the disjointed aesthetic of ruins and sharp breaking of the architectural body and find solace in the imperfections. Deconstructivism doesn't design for the balance of the human body, but rather for the protest against the status quo. To feel alienated, to feel like an alien in a city, to feel not at home, is to act out the aspirations of design as protest and activism. It is our role as subjects - in the streets, in our institutions, and even in our homes - to translate the wildness of deconstructive, seemingly ad hoc forms as places to sit, lie, eat, talk, climb, and perform.

with A. X. Yang
April 13, 2025  11:30pm | Cambridge, MA


Event, Sympathy, Permanence
Telluric Simulations

Ad-Hoc Stereotomy
Our models are built to simulate construction processes and telluric material properties. The EPS foam is pieces with basswood stakes to snap a straight line with cotton string. The gypsum plaster is cast into PETG acrylic molds to emulate the weight of stone and its marks of age.

Before Architecture
The piece is not a traditional piece of architecture. This artefact existed before the idea of architecture. And it’s not a ruin. The work of crafting places of unprecedented meaning requires that we think outside of the notion of typology. The chair, the bench, the window, and all the other elements that we think compose a building don’t exist, these are simply categories by which we describe our world and when we use these categories to design from a top-down approach, we lead ourselves down the path of re-constructing meaningly replicas of dead ideas. Instead, in this age of plenty, we have the opportunity to make things fresh without the dead concepts dragging us down. We can make things with the air of Suprematism. Kazmir Malevich would be proud to see students picking up material, constructing and deconstructing compositions into questions of forms of living. In this model, we are working through a design process that happens from the bottom up. The work is theorized, defined, and redefined as the elements are aggregated, never before, qualities are discovered, not invented a priori. The initial move is the placement of the taut string: “snapping a line” as the American constructors say. The pre-move is the blank canvas, the foam shrouded in salt to simulate the soft outer layer of the Earth and the packed sublayers. The stakes are driven into the ground and the extents of the stone composition are solidified. The blocks so desperately want to land in a state of entropic disarray, but human curiosity stacks, aligns, and arranges telluric models to generate usable, varied, pluralistic, functional space for plant, animal, and human life. The Earthen ground of course asks to be unstable, disordered, anti-cartesian, sinuous, and irregular; the human desire for flatness competes symbiotically with this. The first block is always at an origin point, in this case, the intersection of the two taught lines, on of the quadrant corners, an origin. The corner is the beginning and the end. Telluric Simulations have competing generators: (1) to buttress and grow from an origin, (2) to maintain and increase stability, and (3) to construct heterogenous tectonics providing spectrums of functionality and pluralistic bodily infrastructure, where ideas like chairs, tables, ledges, and shelves slip from their own recognition depending on the subject’s own subjectivity.

April 6, 2025 | Gund Hall, 42 Quincy Street, MA