The project is a fabrication facility developed within the confines of a system of order and within University of Southern California’s School of Architecture to be used by architecture and fine arts students. We want to materialize the flowing forces and creative energy of the student body which resists this imposed, predictable grid and manifest an unnerving, chaotic, and psychotropic space for building knowledge and control upon what we are uncertain of which we feel is what being an architecture student is all about. The attracting forces and datum’s interact with spatial obstacles (boundries, trees, optimal circulation + program), struggling for dominance, suvival & continuity. The negotiations or per say “social contract” between these involve the tendencies uncertain whether to become invasive or submissive to such obstacles to form dynamic collisions, mutating and releasing the petrified campus grid into something much more alive and responsive. The interplay and relationships between the local and global system are described through processes of bio-materials, weaving, continuity (hybridized between bottoms-up and top-down) and robotic fabrication technologies. These protocols of production are tested through physical and digital simulation. The fragility of our material gave us a programmed lifespan in which portions of our building were meant to be reconstructed by incoming students to learn new methods of digital fabrication and reinvent their environment, which at the core we felt was the best way to understand how to transform or manipulate space. At the end of our term in the studio, our resulting form then left us with an image of an entropic building of turbulence which could be conceived of as a space of creativity, knowledge uncertainty & discovery.
Status: School Project
Location: University of Southern California, Los Angleles