SCI-Arc Gehry Prize_Best Thesis

Adviser - Hernan Diaz Alonso 

“We’ve met before haven’t we?”1

Architecture can be posited as a relationship between interiority and form. Glass House embodies an agitated, non-negotiated relationship of both—done through a collapse of the sequencing between them. The aim is to use this collapse in order to invoke something that is simultaneously dream-like and psycho-projective. The result being a new sense of self, generated from the iterative displacement of the two. To be clear, the displacement only exists in the instances when fragments of their sequencing no longer resemble that of the original enveloping form or that of its order of interior life.

David Lynch’s film Lost Highway is a double narrative, where the main character, Fred, escapes his harsh reality by imaging his life differently. Near the beginning of the film, Fred imagines he is lying in bed with his wife, while in fact he is in jail awaiting his execution for her murder. During this scene, he looks up to see his wife’s face but sees someone else—“the mystery man”—a projection of the jealousy he has for her for betraying him. This scene is both dreamlike and psycho-projective, in that there is imagined desire for her to still be alive and an instantiation of his feelings for vengeance.

A house is typically about expressed desire—either that of an architect or a person’s reflection on how they should live. Glass House deals with desire through developing its own sense of subjectivity. Philip Johnson used his glass house to express an architectural desire in cohesion with the principles of The International Style. In this project, glass renders a perception of dream like dislocation. States of disfigurement between form and interior allow for an expressed sense of self, neutralizing either designer or occupant in favor of its own architectural attitude. The glass is the collapse, with levels of resolution and opacity altering the understanding of proximity between form, interior life and form again.