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.
April 6, 2025 | Gund Hall, 42 Quincy Street, MA
Notes For A Theory
Folding , Unfolding, and Refolding
The dialectics of architecture is a force of human reason propelling us to dissolve distinctions into endless spectrums: from loud to quiet, bright to dark, public to private, the list goes on. Too much of any of these extremes is not good. A flattened homogeneity is not good either. The designer who has the pluralistic comfort of humanity as its premier end-in-itself finds a dialectical game and a three-dimensional puzzle in the articulation of form. Any move already implies its counter-move: design is the folding, unfolding, and refolding of oppositions until space is crystalized with ever-greater potential for sociality.
The Tombstone & The Dining Table
Dialectical architecture is enjoyed in lonely solitude and in the ecstacy of the crowd. It serves not just the lost wanderer but also the tightest of groups. Within it, the tombstone coexists with the dining table, at any moment, humanity the opporunity to laugh and to cry. Form has the potential to welcome hearty laughter and uncontrollable tears of a lonely heart.
Somerville, MA - April 5, 2025 8:23am
Notes For A Theory 4
Objectifying Sadness
The historical grief that has generated early American blues music and Christian philosophy in need of peace implies a system of aesthetics which begs for sadness’ own representation. In these traditions, mourning is objectified and analyzed to reconstruct a struggle into a transformative, healing moment. These negative emotions are represented in the howling hymns of American blues and in the Christian philosophy surrounding confession and original sin.
Proclivity To Rise Above
By externalizing, representing, and objectifying one's negative inner condition into an outer material, a release of tension and a chance to observe the fatal falsehood of self-hatred. The light of interpretation pierces through the cracks. The light is a metaphorical yearning for gathering, for dignified love for one another, and the recognition that a good attitude is the origin of all good days.
The Implicit Function
The form of all things need only to allow us to see this gratitude and allow us to continually reconstruct the elements of life into newly useful theories and narratives for future action and service. Money-making is not the aim. Wonder is the aim. Peace is the aim when we speak with honesty and respect, looking each other in the eyes.
Somerville, MA - April 5, 2025 8:23pm
The East Plaza Off 5th Avenue
Patterns of Composition
Upon the ground, surrounding the library, patterns, figures, and axes - defined by pavers massive and miniscule - dramatize the human events that unfold upon it. A visitor’s sense of mundane movement, direction, and stillness is framed, notated, and amplified by the composition of these pavers, tiles, and stones. These arrangements channel the geometry of the building, radiating outwards, maintaining its cartersian lines, remaining parrallel, ever radiating, while picking up on the circulations paths around the building.
The Portico Typology
Steps up to a plateau, just before the entrance to a building, enclosed and covered by an entablature and pediment and calculated intercolumniation, otherwise know as a portico delivers countless, sometime indescribably benefits to a city. This originally greco-roman-etruscan typology has been adopted and evolved into a contemporary, American form of national grandeur does several things for the public, as it is first and foremost a canopy to protect from rain (although of course the higher, the less useful with wind), this moment is also the top of a plateau, a viewing platform. {to be continued...}
The Manhattan Context
The city offers dynamic interplays between power & relief from the sun. The front entrance of the library is West facing, so as the morning light floods the city, the tower just east cast an immense shadow but illuminate the facade. On the otherside, the great shadow cast by the library itself actually serves to cool down the space and give the eyes a bit of a rest. The gradiosity, the in-your-face, the imposition of explicit aesthetics is revealed towards the western morning, the busy traffic, and the green-less street scape of while the restrained humility of the
Appendix
The New York Public Library, designed John Merven Carrère and Thomas Hastings in 1897. They designed the tables, chairs, lamps, chandeliers, hardware, and wastebaskets. The builders were the Norcross Brother. The decorative paintings were done by James Wall Finn, the metalwork Stirling Bronze & Co and the furniture Derby Desk Co. The library shares the block with Bryant Park. Dedicated to William Bryant a romantic poet, journalist, and editor the the New York Evening Post who died in 1878.
New York Public Library - Main Reading Room
April 1, 2025 1:30pm
Recreation Infrastructure E01
Sitting in Solitude
Quite simply, a polished slab of stone. The wind drags beneath your feet. You take your shoes off and your find salvation in the cool wind and the cold stone. You find yourself to put your tired feet on the seat as well. You find that your anxious heat is being pulled out and into into the seat itself and you are healed. And you can’t help but relish in the memory of the approach, how coming from below to see the bench as this scale-less gargantuan object-trouve in the fatigue of your hike. It seems almost as a mirage, as if the bench was a roof for a long house. And you can’t help but wish to live there. Alas, you walk up the incline and rise higher and higher until the seat now looks wider and longer than it ever looked tall. Its dimensions that of a large bed frame in a humble house. You lay your back upon the polish.
Seeing Differently
You deserved this rest, your friends kept walking and you start to see that there more to these benches than first met the eye. You see little inscription. The World Wars, remembered. The men that died in battle, for freedom. The Altmark incident: Four men of New Zealand, protected 200 British soldiers off the coast Norway, but died in action. Two men each in two planes, crashed into each other. Two died on impact with the water, two lost at sea. They two years younger than you are now.
New Haven, CT | March 31, 2025
The Spark of Storytelling
Situationist Aesthetics
What enchants us when we walk through the city? It might be the density of it all, or the warmth, or maybe the coldness. Maybe it’s the unending noise. The chaos. The magic of the coincidences, the chance-encounter, accidental run-ins, and the unexpected moments when you turn a street corner. Maybe for you it’s the infrastructure. The housing. The spectacle. The dadaist collage of unresolved tensions. The detournement. The transparency of the facades and the vision of people stacked so close yet so far. The grids and cells. Maybe it’s the forward looking futurism and the extrusions of capital and the facades of eccentricity and eclecticism. Or the shade we receive from the casted monuments of grandeur. Or the strange wind from the corners and the blasé attitude. Young urbanites find splendor in squalor, brave humility in underground culture, and virtue in always-wet concrete.
After The Underground
When they find themselves at the bottom of a ditch or the middle of a dark alley doing things they once found enchanting but are not unsustainable, dangerous, and deeply unhealthy for the mind and the body all at once, the youth are tired and some recognize the unsustainability of what was once the enchantment of dirty realism. The youth, after a while, are tired of the squalor, the speed. Some will want to settle down. Some too quickly, others not quick enough. But we all move on after the mission of exciting youth. We find peace and harmony in the countryside. We find it healthy to think about being with one person. Of believe in a God and being responsible, organized, clean, and dependable.
This will though lead to another issue, of missing the big city again. Missing the unpredictability of that salubrious, dissolvable youth. The responsible citizen, in a neo-liberal consumerist economy is always tempted back into debauchery. Our subject is thus thrown into these cycles of shifting values, from organized to playful, from open to restrained. Opposing values hold their own value systems and the culture of spontaneous spectacularity and distraction holds us so firmly so as to render us sometimes unable to focus on real issues and instead focus on how we identify with certain groups, where we stand on social issues, what brands we relate to, and what movie characters we aspire to be and take down.
Advice to The Restless
We live in shifting sands of values for good reason and my only advice to anyone out there lost and tired is to bring yourself to a higher level of thought. Raise your mind over the crowd to see the buildings, trees, and the sky above to remember that you are never alone. Look up, over, and past the sea of rabblers and walk the straight path to enjoy nature, architecture, the weather, the people, and all other things that money can’t quite buy. We have been endowed a commonwealth as citizens of free nations such as the United States. Look at the monuments and the arcades, and the verandas, the porches, and the front doors. Look at the window frames of the old buildings, and the stone animals that guard the gates of your neighborly institutions. Look at the patterns on the facade and the forms that oscillate between abstraction and figuration. Enjoy all of this, let your imagination run wild. Write something down or call someone as a response to it all. These designs are gifts to you. Architects and designers have donated to you visual and bodily infrastructure. Optical and tactile gifts for you find solace. Don't let the bright flashing lights of consumer-industrial ease trick you into purchasing another piece of potent sugar. Let the sun and the art of the city give you life as you make peace with a stranger. Say hi as you pass by. City life could be so much easier. Architectural form becomes a visual site.
Architectural forms and facades are masks, a form of cosmetics for us to see the true poetry of the building. Facades are a fiction for others to find their own truths. The built environment contains sometimes faded but usually illegible memories. They are meant to be re-understood, re-interpreted, and mis-read. They are meant to be moments for us all to find new meanings to our own lives. American architecture, the un-European architecture, delivers itself from an inspiration in the building of an organic architecture like wright had said. Its not about being critical of power dynamics and its not about providing surreal, collage-like, dadaist experiences of alienation as a form of care. American architecture is born out of its landscapes. It’s born out of its vastly empty land stolen from the Natives. American architecture is born out of a pompous courage to celebrate life as they had done, insulated from the World Wars and the violence of European history to find a will to art and craftsmanship that is always being thwarted by the import of older, often more refined goods. The architecture has a vague memory of the greco-roman and Gothic tradition while finding its own ways of assembling sticks to make the single family house. Or the facade of a proto-modern articulation.
Allegories on The Facades: Memories & Our Imaginations
What are we after when we are talking about memory? What are we after? More memories? Are we looking for warmth and peace in the nostalgia of oral storytelling? Are we hungry, thirsty, and yearning for the atmosphere of collective, universal memories? Shared narratives and common understanding of the past, present, and future. What can we do for this? As architects and designers? Can we choose certain stories to tell? And choose how legible they are? How literal? The crush of statistics, officials, and futurist ideology that have caged us in which are mourning our own capacity to have living memory. Memory and history are ripped apart and we, through an imaginative process, are seeking a richer life or a stronger life story. A story we can tell everyday, any day, and any day to inspire hope and transform struggle into hope.
We are not looking upon a facade or a monument to document the facts, we are going to look at fugitive accumulations of life on the facade, behind the grided building. The expression of oneself and its sparks from the building itself. Truth is a flooding. A speech. A mournful call towards to the power of a story. Tell a story to a stranger or a friend and give them something to care for. Tell them how you're still alive.
South Station, Boston | March 31, 2025