Core Studio II Final Review

There’s this idea of inhaling the grit of the city and then displaying it and then inhabiting it.

Deep breaths.

I’m gonna talk about my project.
At the very beginning, I was creating spatial composites out of existing objects — reassembling them to create hybrids of things that colonize each other — injecting new meaning to them. A new purpose.

This came from my study of doppelganger conditions within building types — the adaptive reuse of old bank buildings for new purposes which presented discrepancies between form and content. Something suddenly only appeared to be what it’s supposed to be.

I started constructing and collecting my very own building modules as I started to truly dematerialize and lose reference from the beginning (from what it used to be). It became something else entirely. This idea of repurposing became this idea of recycling which became this idea of cycling, or archiving.

The project tracks and records the city by materializing its “lost” waste into an accumulation of itself— an archive of urban form. It is archiving itself. Literally. Both at a macro scale and a micro scale.

This is a sectional mutation timeline – of the programmatic, formal and material evolution the project. How it fossilizes the grit of the city. There is this idea of inhaling the grit of the city and then displaying it and then inhabiting it. And through this bizarre accumulation with an almost unknown goal, it would become a colony. A colony for things you leave behind. A colony that defines you by collecting everything you are not.
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The building is really an armature, a machine, upon which it would create itself. This would happen in phases and in different scales — – from a membrane to a brick module — and it would really become a record of things manifested through a record of the building. I’m calling this process the Grit Fossilization Organ / Digestive System.

We start with:
Prehension – or collection, where the building inhales the grit of the city,
Mastication – or chewing, where the building reshapes this material, compresses it within a hammer mill….
Deglutition – where it swallows and delivers to the membrane/ which I’ll talk about in a second…
Absorption – or amalgamation, where it conforms with other elements including the building’s tissue
Fossilization – where it hardens, embodies the shape of the module.

It then keeps growing til it meets the opposite module growing towards it – it would become a block with many pockets. These phases vary in forms of habitation – from machine (with operators) to what it becomes when the module meets its boundaries. (colony)

These collage sections are spatially allocating infrastructural moments … they are highlighting activated zones…. These are spaces that may have been there or will be there, since these phases aren’t just happening one at a time but all at once, and everywhere. They’re all separate chapters of the same story in different phases of how it came about. The junkyard is how it is generated and the colony is what it becomes.

The armature/primary structure that the building begins with is a lung-like membrane with varying degrees of porosity. We’re going to zoom into it.

*The “grit” is everything from particles in the air like dust, ash, synthetic eliments like lint to sediments from rainwater runoff to large metal scraps, and actual building parts.

In this micro detail material (scraps/grit) is:

Filtered
Sorted
Dissolves as it reacts to a solvent , kind of like saliva…..
Swallowed
Coagualates like how a lung bubble or nodule is produced…
Expands… like a tumor…

It’s like an oyster with teeth: we have a composite, hardening into a pearl.

If we zoom back out, the detail is actually the building times X powers of 10: where the membrane at the micro scale is the vacuum at the macro scale, the teeth = the hammer mill, the nodules are the air pockets, the mass compressed is the building module, etc as we go through the grit fossilization phases.

Since we’re looking at this as an organ, a digestive system, naturally, there would be Excretion. Or Regurgitation. When we have components penetrating the skin – like a splinter. It’s rejected and begins to poke out. And perhaps reinhaled which introduces this feedback loop – which would mean that the collection would be recollecting itself via this notion of cycling.

There are also these attachments – these large pieces that stick to the building. If you imagine how large things are stuck on but don’t fit through a nozzle of a vacuum cleaner, they become like an armor along the skin and start to layer vertically. This is how the modules begin to climb. And how actual building parts in their original state serve a new purpose. And how the project then generates its own components.
The project is really inventing and reinventing the future based on what it is. It collects itself for future possibilities. This immense accumulation, collection, aggregation and repetition is really building an archive. An archive of itself.