There is a dense layer of visual and material information at the surface of the city. And yet, when architects consider the contexts in which they intervene, they often look past the preanimated surfaces around them and focus on abstract blocks that easier to understand, to quantify, and ultimately, to ignore. In contrast, my project aims to closely engage with the urban surface -- composed of layers of pollution, paint, scratches, graffiti, and other indices of the city’s complex and messy life -- as a way to imagine an architecture that creatively augments already-existing qualities rather than eliding them.

Using techniques developed by architectural preservation, including rubbings, transfers, and paint scrapings, this thesis will exploit the particular weirdness that actually characterizes the everyday surfaces we only imagine to be mundane. The images, patterns, and materials thus sampled will provide the basis for an architectural surface that estranges through intensification rather than erasure.