CONNECTIVE MEASURES 2009
SCI-Arc T. EXHIBITION
LOS ANGELES, CA​

 

The intention of a phenomenal art is simply the gift of seeing a little more today than you did yesterday.

-Robert Irwin

Being and Circumstance: Notes Toward a Conditional Art

Today,

 

We are a culture resistant to permanence. Recent technological advancements, notably in communications, have played a role in this change, drastically altering our sense of relationship and further confounding our perception of small scale space, particularly the nuance. Buildings and spaces within those buildings once played an active role in this relationship, making visible to a receptive audience a very real sense of place. That visibility has since grown clouded, as static, everyday components can no longer compete with the vast sensory numbness of the present. Were losing the knowledge of place as we increasingly choose temporal routes through it.

 

​As designers, it is often that we are presented with the arduous challenge of inserting a new architecture within the confines of the old. The complexity of the task quickly materializes, pertaining less to discussions of skill and execution, but rather unveiling itself as a series of questions: Where is the surface? Whats under it? What do we assume and where do we exercise independence? What is at the heart of this juxtaposition: the architecture of the re-imagined authentic? This thesis sheds light on two existing scenarios. 1) That we have lost our ability to receive the nuance. 2) That regardless of this loss, we are continually engaged in the creation of architecture.

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​This thesis labors for place, offering a dialogue between that of the existing and newly conceived, recognizing that achievable permanence evolves out of an intimacy with that place: a careful examination beyond the surface