SCI-Arc Graduate Thesis
Advisor: Marcelyn Gow

Jury:  Erick Cárcamo, Hernan Diaz-Alonso, Evan Douglis, Marcelyn Gow, Alex McDowell, Florencia Pita, Ali Rahim, Russell Thomsen

This thesis aims to jostle Architecture from the subordinate role it often plays in mixed media relationships by exploring Architecture’s “affective range” via the physicality of mixed mediums, therefore rediscovering the conceptual and material significance of form within the mixed media niche.  Within this niche, architectural form and imagery have had a long relationship.  In Kissing Architecture, Sylvia Lavin describes how these relationships work or perhaps do not work as:

Architecture extending and intensifying its effects through the short-term borrowing of a partner medium’s flavor; boringly mute building[s] grasping for meaning; [and] banality is an integral part of why and how [this relationship sometimes] operate[s] architecturally.

The goal of this thesis is to shift this relationship towards symbiosis by creating a reciprocal harmony between image and form through the exploration of embedded imagery.  Therefore a host can begin to annex materiality from its partner medium, and the relationship between image and host can be confounded, offering new opportunities for the visualization of form.  

Architectural poché offers characteristics conducive for embedding of imagery.  Material choice and the depth of architectural components help to establish relationships between the exterior and the interior by addressing issues of translucency, mis-registration, deformation, duration, and stasis.  By working through poché the image imbues tangible material with ethereal qualities, and shifts the mixed media relationship from a surface treatment to a dependent state in which the transience of the image shifts to persistence.