master of architecture graduate thesis

Haptic Space and Other Guilty Pleasures

california college of the arts

master of architecture

YEAR
2017

THIS THESIS AIMS TO…

The project embraces the non-predictive, non-optimal, and non-controllable properties of a malleable material rather than the designer’s will. Most of all, this thesis seeks to exploit existing behaviors, to challenge inherent properties. As a result, it introduces a new form of physical and psychological interaction with the spatial experience. This methodology utilizes the physical scale of materials, gravity, and imperfection while unforeseen implications surface, challenging our notions of hierarchy, boundaries, and porosity. 

Haptic Space and Other Guilty Pleasures aspires to produce new physical and psychological interaction between the built environment, materiality, and user. The space created is challenging; however, a host of relationships emerge that blur the notion of hard/ soft, rigid/flexible, fixed/manipulable. Radically new spaces reveal a new perception of part in relation to the whole that is no longer in opposition. The co-authorship thus offers not only new understandings of space and materiality, but of collaboration between designer+material as well as material in collaboration with unveiled material behaviors.

Materiality is often suppressed by the desire to create formal characteristics which tends to either restrict the potentials of architecture materials or disambiguate them to the point of architectural idealism. In response, Haptic Space and Other Guilty Pleasures proposes a fundamental shift from an architecture of forceful space-making to a co-authorship between designer and material. 

I chose to work with a misbehaving and loose fitting aggregate within a material that performs in tension. Through many object scale research models, I cataloged the material tolerances, preferences, and moments of failure. These demonstrate how synching transfers the loads and how my authority controls the material in ways it wants to work — distributed compression. The object scale multiplied to thread between and through where one moment of load transfers to the adjacent creating an interdependency among materials. 

This distinction between a single authoritative author and a co-authorship is particularly urgent given the increasing importance of collaboration in design. The need to work through multidisciplinary means already reveals that material strategies are being passed through multiple hands and returned full-cycle yielding evidence of control. 

While the thesis is not overtly “collaborative,” the material co-authorship advocates a new space making technique that is a symbiotic relationship between networked layers. The project embraces the non-predictive, non-optimal, and non-controllable properties of a malleable material rather than the designer’s will. Most of all, this thesis seeks to exploit existing behaviors, to challenge inherent properties.