Thesis Review is a collection of conversations, statements and inquiries into the current state of thesis in academia. Thesis projects give a glimpse into the current state of the academic arena while painting a picture for the future of practice. 

Each feature will present a contemporary thesis project through the voice of those that constructed it. This week, we talk to Connor Gravelle, winner of the The Blythe and Thom Mayne Undergraduate Thesis Prize. 

What is the thesis?

This project refocuses the aim of a certain kind of contemporary architecture, proposing that architecture can emerge subtly as much from the extant conditions of a site as from the singular overwhelming will of a designer. At the crux of that balance, this project considers those preexisting conditions which speak to the social and cultural heritage of a place. It posits that architecture can perform a reconciliatory dialogue between circumstances of the present and the complex, often difficult historical experiences which predispose them. Because such concerns of what it means to belong, or what exactly an identity is, have recently foregrounded themselves as questions paramount to the process of understanding placehood, this naturally problematizes the architectural practice as a transcriptive discipline for identifying, materializing and, most importantly, defining the ideological conditions of these given contexts, cultures and programs.

What is the project?

This extension to an existing art museum in Lima takes to task preservation for its immediate engagement with identity. This process begins first in the demands of a competition brief that places heavy cultural worth in the elevations of the existing Neoclassical structure onsite. Rather than conforming entirely below grade, the project literally exercises the original structure of its west façade and moves the amputated face 40 meters towards curbside. The leftover negative space of this operation provides the working room for the new contemporary art wing to infill the space between the original structure and its severed street-side face. The museum subsumes the site’s demand for a pedestrian underpass across a heavily trafficked thoroughfare as well as a subway entrance by gently, slightly pulling patrons, passersby, metro riders, delivery trucks and flaneurs alike below the masses of both structures through a crevice between the ground and the perceptual weight of the museum extension. This circulatory flattening of the presumed hierarchy between museum lobby, public concourse and delivery dock challenges the institutional parameters of the architecture from its very moment of entry. The project probes architecture as a method for producing alternative means of belonging beyond an outdated dichotomy between traditional vernacular and building as something we might call “object-gift” to the city. It establishes a series of conversations which reframe its context, both literally in terms of a neighborhood and a park and more figuratively in terms of a culture and a value system. These concerns highlight the performative quality of architecture in the contemporary cultural field as a method not only for establishing value but for questioning it through tightly choreographed interventions, subtle adjacencies and their consequent conversational possibilities.

What was your inspiration for this thesis?

Working on this project, I became fascinated with the trouble that we face when coming to terms with history, which in terms of the physical conditions around us throughout life is often arbitrated by architecture. Particularly in the last few years, so much of our cultural dialogue has dealt with acknowledging equally with the achievements and injustices which have for better or worse propelled human society into the present. We live at such an amazing moment, especially in the United States, at which so much pain is coming to the surface to be processed. The spate of protests demanding the removal of Confederate statues or the push to reevaluate our naïvely fetishistic histories of powerful men speak to the virtue of questioning how we arbitrate ourselves in the wake of what happened before. As this occurs in our own understanding of self identity, it too can be realized in the singular perspective of an individual building. In the case of my thesis, I became engrossed in the duality of colonial buildings, especially in the countries of Latin America such as Peru, where the project is located. While to some degree these buildings bear material witnesses to a harsh history of exploitation and violence, those who inhabit them have every right champion them as representations of their history. Who I am to tell a citizen of Lima that the embedded Eurocentrism of their city’s art museum is something that must be condemned? History is immense and resists regression: Hong Kong cannot go back to being a fishing village. Colonialism and other severe injustices which history has inflicted on those it most burdens are things which we cannot erase, things with which we must come to terms. Because it embodies the social, cultural and political circumstances of its time, I see architecture as a crucial component to this reconciliation between our ourselves and the history that predicates every aspect of our existence.

I became fascinated with the trouble that we face when coming to terms with history, which in terms of the physical conditions around us throughout life is often arbitrated by architecture. 

How did the thesis change over the course of the process?

The further along I went in the process of developing my thesis the more I felt an intense desire to cull unnecessary architectural moves to approach what I felt truly expressed my beliefs in architecture. I encountered a desire to really stand behind what I was presenting rather than hiding in a pile of geometry. While the thesis began as an admittedly naïve exercise in geometry and form, my advisor, Michael Young, pushed me to find my own meaning sense of intentionality. Midway through the project, I struggled so much to arbitrate the aesthetic distance the relative simplicity of this project put between the institutional expectations (of complexity and formal inventiveness) around me with my own values. Eventually I reached a kind of calm understanding between these, because of course the dialogue around a project in academia is something also so intrinsically valuable. Still, the empowering feeling of that moment at which I purified the project down to my own terms is a clarity I carry forward and hope to enact not only on my own future projects but to explore with those classmates around me who also find themselves entering the field at large.

What other angles do you want to continue working on?

Thesis allowed me to value the ambiguity and subtlety that architecture is capable of producing. Architecture is uniquely adept at producing the kind of culturally valuable experiences which occur in the background of perception, the almost unnoticed. Due to this backgrounding, they are so regularly sidelined, whether that be due to finances or the absurd fixation we have on creating overtly “fun” architecture. Now that I’m out working in the field, I bear witness to the ways that an architectural concept is pushed back against by clients, their budgets and otherwise profit-driven thinking. I want to learn an effective way to communicate the long-lasting benefits of a humble interaction with architecture in this climate of flashy graphics and naïvely optimistic promises we regrettably make to justify projects. When architects communicate with the world at large solely through such fantastic language, they denigrate those who work with us: we can expect more of our clients and the public at large than we express when we give them only architectural one-liners. To engage in a conversation through architecture which is gentle, subtle and intimately aware of the depth and profundity of all contexts is something from my thesis which I strive for going forward.

How does your thesis fit within the discipline?

I think architecture is reaching a moment at which it desperately requires a reevaluation into how the spaces we design effect the social and political conditions of their contexts. With the overwhelmingly formal prerogatives of the discipline only recently turning outwards to question what the world means back to the field, we are finally close to overcoming the wholesale sanitization of the political meaningfulness that buildings impose. I believe that it is crucial for designers to consider the meaning of their work in these contexts: how does architecture create a conversation between the site and its conditions – both those literal and those more abstract such as political meaning or the social ramifications a building exerts?

What did you discover during the process that you did not foresee?

Of course part of the process of developing one’s position is to stand one’s ground clearly, but during this thesis I feel as if I found some value of conceptual humility. As architects, we encounter problems entirely beyond our comprehension. We encounter sites with potentially hundreds of years of history, meaning and consequence. It’s perfectly okay to stand before that dumbfounded. I once heard a quote in a Tarkovsky film which resonated with me, “When a man is just born, he is weak and flexible. When he dies, he is hard and insensitive. When a tree is growing, it's tender and pliant. But when it's dry and hard, it dies. Hardness and strength are death's companions. Pliancy and weakness are expressions of the freshness of being.” While I went into thesis with the firm intention to create some sort of ultimate culmination of my opinions, I found that ultimately the most rewarding experience was reducing myself to only those beliefs I honestly held. I found great unexpected satisfaction in clearing my mind and approaching the world blankly, asking a site or a context what it was or what meanings it held before projecting onto it my preconceived notions of how I expected it perform for the ends of my egotistical architecture.

How do you see this thesis progressing into your career?

I believe my thesis set me up to both understand the direction I needed to head towards in terms of the offices I was interested in working at and acted as a clear introduction of sorts, in as much as it demonstrated to potential employers which strengths, training and, especially, interests were specific to me as a designer.

What were the key moments within your thesis?

Two particular moments stand out to me from the process, those at which I decided (first) to remove the existing façade along the Western face of the building and relocate it, rather than destroying it, and (second) when I came to the conclusion to shroud both buildings, the new and the old, in a glass screen which complicates the reading of the façade as a simple way to understand what is old and what is new. During the thesis discussion, one juror in particular posited the opinion that he would simply remove the Western façade of the existing building altogether. “Why bother keeping it?”, he asked rhetorically. For me, the removal of the façade would have been a conceit to contemporary architecture, a brute maneuver that would have spoken to both a history of erasure and a naïve contemporary sense in the architectural community that whatever we construct will, though some act of sheer mastery, transcend the importance of place. Although I did empathize that in a certain academic discourse the façade represents a painfully colonial past for the local community, I also understand that on some level those living around this building are proud of its beauty and want to protect their heritage, whether we as outsiders find that palatable or not. By incorporating that façade into the design, albeit moved across the site to accommodate the building’s extension, I hope that the architecture might come to exist someplace between a difficult past and an optimistic present. Likewise, sheathing the building in a glass screen that concealed some of the difference between new and old suggests that their relationship is not necessarily so binaristic. It’s not even linear. We think that the past and present are linked, in that exact order, but after this thesis I have come to understand that, the present exerts itself just as much on the past, especially in the sense of space. As the past leads to the present, the present predefines the parameters by which we can only so faintly see the past.

What do you wish you would have known before thesis?

In the time since I completed this thesis, the cultural urgency of reconciling ourselves with the past has only become more pressing. Conversations that were once quite specific to a certain sect of academia have spilled over in the most painfully fascinating ways into the broader public discourse. Particularly in the United States, there is an urgency to the process of understanding the spatial ramifications of our past. Thousands of remaining Confederate monuments attest to this urgency. These things are not merely neutral bystanders from another time but exert a force on contemporary existence that carries forward the horrors and injustices of the past wrought by the powerful against those whom society so fragrantly failed. Regimes leave behind more than simply histories, they live on in their architectural instantiations, and these things continue to mean something. A statue of a Confederate General in a contemporary American city is both more and less than its mere physical material presence. In that sense, it is weak in that metal and stone can be toppled and smashed to vindicate our progress from the dark ideologies it represents. Yet not just these statues but entire buildings – the entire Neoclassical cloak by which Washington professes its governmental authority – project a kind of cultural power. They are our history, solidified into physical space. They compel us to subscribe to a certain way of being, a certain power structure of who is and who isn’t allowed into the civil sphere. They often feel slightly stronger than our resilience to overcome their ideologies as a society. Something has to be done, and it only propels me more everyday to witness the cultural climate we inhabit to believe that architects must take agency in the ways that our work establishes, enforces or questions the unseen power structures around us.

What other thesis projects were on your radar?

I like to think of thesis as something larger than a singular project, so I didn’t focus too much on other thesis projects in particular as much as I became enthralled in other’s collective bodies of work. In the professional field, I was enamored by the work of Caruso St. John for its gentle subtlety, how such a rigorous architecture could be executed in exquisite ways, like a dull ringing that builds larger and larger until it’s the only roaring thing you can hear. The entire disciplinary output of contemporary England, perhaps most eloquently expressed in David Chipperfield’s buildings, is something that fascinates me to this day – a clear movement which I think we haven’t quite digested as a field but whose aesthetic and social qualities will undoubtedly influence some of us for a while to come. In the academic setting, the work of Khao Vu, a student at the time at the GSD who was rather active on social media, captivated me with its simplicity and ambiguous geometry. The work of Preliminary Research Office (P-R-O) was always such an inspiration, as well. Their mastery of executing subtle perceptual spaces through extremely precise geometry challenged how I understood space and was something against which I found myself always gauging the effectiveness of what I was working on, even if it aesthetically differed. Of course, other thesis students around me were always driving the conversation. In particular: Adrian Wong, Deborah Garcia and Suhan Na, three other students, were always there and the process of us creating our theses together was not only one of productive comparison but, I hope, one of forging long-lasting prerogatives for how we, generationally speaking, would navigate the architectural discipline ahead of us.

How much did your institution help or guide you through your thesis?

My thesis constantly got feedback someplace between SCI-Arc, the institution at which it took place, and Michael Young (Young+Ayata), my advisor. His AT, Melissa Shin (Shin Shin Architecture), was also really formative in guiding me through the project. I will be forever grateful to SCI-Arc for giving me a creative environment in which to find myself. As a visiting faculty, Michael was new to the setting of our school and offered a fresh outlook on what was going on. Michael always pushed hard at our presumptions about architecture. So much of thesis was an unwinding of sorts, filtering out which ideas and opinions were really mine from the vastness of everything I had learned in the years before at architecture school. In that way, thesis was a kind of painful therapy, but one through which I reached some catharsis. Parsing out which things mattered to me from those to which I was indifferent or, most importantly, those with which I disagreed was such a valuable experience that continues to set the tone of my experiences in these extremely early phases of my career.

What do you wish could have been different?

So much of my time during thesis was spent pushing through ideas I had been trained to mimic before I could find myself able to actually investigate what was pertinent to me. I have to admit that I was a bit blindsided by the amount of thinking I was doing without really understanding the architectural ramifications I was meddling with. My education was overwhelmingly formal – for that I am so thankful for all the history and technique I had instilled into me – but my interests in architecture are primarily social and political. It took a long time to arrive at my method for expressing this in my thesis, as if I had to work through ideas taught to me one-by-one to determine those with which I agreed from those I found counterproductive to the creation of an effective architecture. I found this process so difficult, both emotionally and intellectually, but having ultimately arrived at a set of opinions I value and stand by I am so incredibly thankful for it.

If you could do this again, what would you change?

Roughly half way through the development of my thesis, I was told that I had removed all the interesting elements from the project. I pretty much agree, that much was true. Looking back though, I see the value of that process which was necessitated in order to create something that was my own. If I were to do it again, I would push harder for that austere minimalism, for that complete obfuscation of things which stood against the absolute architecture I was seeking. There is so much pressure in academic settings to output something which functions within the pro forma of the institution. There is so much direction to contribute to whatever end currently furthers the ongoing discourse. Although I find that interaction so precious (especially as I witness its relative absence from the professional field), I have realized that there was something provocative in stripping a project of its institutional value, even if only to add some back in the end. What I was left with at that singular point were only the barest bones of a project, and I felt precisely then closest to enfranchising myself in making decisions which I could truly stand by. The current climate of architecture indulges us in complexity, but in reality I believe sometimes the simplest things are the most rigorous to defend, intellectually speaking. To make a singular, strong statement is something that I struggle towards even now. It’s something from that moment in my thesis that I know effected me greatly.

What do you think the current state of thesis is within Architecture and how can it improve?

I do believe thesis is an important capstone to an architectural education. Because it forces everyone to focus on the specific topics which are pertinent to their own interests and particular world-views, it functions quite decently to prepare people within the transitional moment leaving school. Especially being an undergrad, on a very pragmatic level I would always defend the value of thesis for the simple fact that it helped me orient myself as I left school. Rather than entering the field blindly — without a serious amount of considered foresight — I am extremely thankful that I was given the space, time and academic motivation to foster an agenda which subsequently assisted me in filtering the kind of offices I felt would most benefit me to work at post-graduation. In terms of improving thesis, I do remember one pressure which persistently caused great stress among us students. The drive to produce an architecture that is attractive within the academic environment of a school or intellectual moment is a plague that not only robs students of their chance to encounter what they really believe but beleaguers the institutional value of accumulating a diversity of projects. It shifts the power of thesis from a pedagogical setting of shared discovery to one of individual showmanship. I really hope that students can feel independent yet guided, supported while crafting their first explicitly self-curated presentation to the field of their identities are as designers. Thesis can be such a valuable experience, a chance to sort though everything you digested over half a decade of education. To go through that by your own prerogative is frightening but fundamentally necessary to become the kind of individual we desperately need, capable of absorbing the myriad of perspectives which comprise the act of making in this extremely multifaceted field. 

One more thing…

I would especially like to thank Alejandro Loor, James Chen, Leo Wan, Raina Lin, Jelvis Jiao and Tucker van Leuwen-Hall for all the help that they gave me in bringing this thesis to fruition in the last few steps of the semester. They’re all incredibly talented people with whom it was very nice to spend such a formative moment, and their assistance throughout was invaluable. Around me in studio, Adrian Wong, Debbie Garcia and Suhan Na were so supportive, and it was an incredible experience to see us follow our own paths together. Of course, Michael Young and Melissa Shin were also such a significant force in helping to make this thesis, and I continue to be so grateful for their persistent questioning and effort to challenge me to see new things and reconsider my positions in architecture. As an institution, SCI-Arc was indispensable for its support and the sheer diversity of what we were presented with as students over all those years. Working at an office now, I feel so thankful for the technical knowhow and critical rigor that was instilled in us. Receiving the Blythe and Thom Mayne Prize for Undergraduate Thesis was also an unbelievable opportunity for which I continue to be thankful, not only for the award itself, but for the academic environment that allows for such valuable contributions to instill students emerging from their education into the field with a sense of institutional support and academic lineage.