Radical Reconstruction
Rhode Island School of Design, Architecture
Thesis Preparation, Part I
“If you live long enough, you’ll see all your buildings destroyed. After all,
it’s only the idea that counts.” Louis Sullivan
To create an architecture, but not a building; to make a drawing, but not a detail; to design space, but without existing bounds. By challenging the legitimacy of designing for construction, architecture can be explored in an unconventional manner. Rather than designing to build a building, concepts and techniques will be built through architectural design. Liberated from the shackles of convention, rise brilliant spaces that have yet been dared to be imagined.
By looking past intending to construct, a concept of imagination can be embraced. Analytically studying architecture, in its purest sense, as space and form, can spawn new ideas and conventions. Disassociating it from its predetermined practice of the antiquated, allows for alterations of the perceived, in duality with opposing the conception of it. Questions and problems can be explored through innovating upon methodologies, opposed to cyclically repeating the past. Curiosities are to be sought out and discoveries welcomed.
This work will stretch the idea of what architecture can do by expanding upon what it can be. It becomes a way of thinking, seeing, and understanding relationships within space and how they can be analyzed and diagnosed. The client will be disregarded as an autonomous individual, but rather as the field of architecture and design. By understanding and devising the intent of a drawing, removes the notion of dwelling in the transformation and translation between it and the building. The drawing is an analytical projection of what a building can be, independent of the representation of what it is. With immediate provocative implications, the drawing can be efficiently distributed and absorbed by its audience. While these ideas can be seemingly irrational on the surface, that notion can be outweighed by what is even more irresponsible, the refusal to embrace its potential or to think beyond our existing limitations.
Through drawing, technical practices will be challenged by creating a project as a platform for experimental and radical space; to test techniques, exploit theories, open minds, and to free ourselves from the predetermined boundaries and limitations of architecture. A project in which the space will be informed by the drawings, rather than the drawings be of the space. The work will be a self-supportive making of architecture, through a making of art.