Graduate Thesis Project: I am out of focus

The thesis is found in fluctuation; 
where the architecture is running out of 
focus,
where the ground is running out of power.

“There are a thousand things to be done, to be invented, to be forced, by those who, recognizing the relations of power in which they are implicated, have decided to resist or escape them.”

Michel Foucault :Dits et Écrits (1)

Contemporary culture is often defined as a world of perpetual commodity production and consumption. According to this schema, architecture plays the role of conquered victim, its aspirant utopias assaulted by exchange economies, unstable currencies, the vagaries of the market and consumerism.  Iconic buildings, exclusive brand names, slick materials and structures subsumed by advertisements; discourse degenerates, architecture is commodified, abandoned, burned, exhausted, vacant, bankrupt. 

This thesis questions the veracity of this narrative, arguing to the contrary, that it is possible for architecture to escape its wretched fate:  Its victim status.
Positing a robustly inauthentic architecture, more than capable of holding its own against a barrage of junk.  This thesis articulates a new dialog between a revivified architecture and today’s all-powerful consumerism.

In pursuit of this dialog this thesis explores the explosive exchange and the reaction between the industrial aesthetic of the 20th Century and today’s consumerist agendas:  the supermarket, stock exchange, luxury brand store and high-density housing.
The resultant architecture renegotiates newness and artificiality, subverting the pathos of the industrial relic in favor of a glossy optimism.

In 2014 work buries work, value buries value, aesthetic buries aesthetic, consumption buries production and architecture, no longer wretched, refashions itself as a gloriously exclusive dump for its ostentatious clienteles. 

1. Michel Foucault, Dits et Écrits 1954–1988 Vol.II, 1976–1988 edited by Daniel Defert and François Ewald, p. 911-912