Readymade
Convention
Los Angeles,
Cambridge
& Nebraska
Drawing is the only medium of architecture that can challenge physical limitations by completely ignoring them. Gravity, time, direction are all at the creators’ discretion or interpretation.
Allowing oneself to study conventions from within one of architecture’s most sacred conventions, drawing. Not taking anything for granted, knowing certain inert tools are not appropriate for the task at hand. This grants us the ability to step away, create a new space, and discover, this is where this thesis finds itself. Not starting from scratch, not trying to be original, only trying to find some place safe, to stop, look and invite a little slipperiness, lucidness into the conversation.
This allows all the freedoms of tropes, rules, irony, and weaknesses. Of course you can not escape complete convention, completely aware of such an impossibility; that in itself is where this research hopes to land, at the cliff edge, where we can look over and wonder, just wonder, what it might be like to jump, and what the possibilities might be.
Used as an associative machine, producing drawing, banking on previous conventions such as plans, sections, elevations, building, rendering, model, composition, and image will expose the fractures upon which to be exploited. Brutally coupling qualities of phenomenology and Cartesian methods of space and drawing; this research strives to search, discover and accidentally encounter moments of mis-alignment.
On its own form is void of context and meaningless; allowing the break from rigidity of an inherent meaning towards a speculative one. From Piranesi, to the Texas Rangers (dot-dot game), to Eric Owen Moss (Culver City), to Perry Kulper (drawings) there has been an inclination to exploit and understand how the combination of primitive, simple form could produce a latency from the words to their images, a schism of consciousness, allowing a momentary fracture in association, a speculative view once had, now lost.
Architecture and its process may not be about upward progress of a staircase or a fluid motion of a facade but about evoking acts of gathering, or dispersing, calling attention to a spot or moment in an other wise chaotic group of symbols.
There is a larger pleasure in discovery than in knowing; while knowledge provides comfort, uncertainty keeps us alive and engaged in the world. Architecture lies between the limits of the conscious mind to decipher the limitless limits of the subconscious minds.
