In 1964, Isaac Asimov speculated that by 2014, "Mankind will suffer badly from the disease of boredom, a disease spreading more widely each year...The lucky few who can be involved in creative work of any sort will be the true elite of mankind, for they alone will do more than serve a machine.” Those in the field of architecture are among the “lucky few” Asimov refers to; architects and designers have the power to inject spontaneity, humor and newness into our environment and combat boredom. However, the contemporary architect is increasingly interested in a single architectural drawing or graphic image being used to represent a complex project, and we argue that these single images are contributing to the boredom plaguing the 21st century. By becoming image producers, architects are giving up their agency as space makers. This project aims to reassert the agency that has been lost through generations of architectural education and practice.
Boredom, or the formation of an experience into a habit, is developed after having the same experience for 21 days in a row. To provide relief from the monotony of habitual life, we are speculating about a new kind of architecture. A 21 Day Thing Architecture. An architecture comprised of a series of things which can be replaced periodically, suspending our expectations and disrupting our assumptions every 21 days. Similar to Hejduk’s Victims, 21 Day Thing Architecture is a proposal which will manifest as a series of distinct characters (things) creating different spatial experiences. This architecture originates in drawings and images produced by contemporary architects. We consider these to be objects, or the easily replicable, which we aim to turn into things. Bill Brown asserts things are that which shed socially encoded values and become present to us in new ways through suspension of habit. An object can become a thing through careful and thoughtful design.
Our investigation of 21 Day Thing Architecture began with four flat (existing only as drawing or image) projects; Pool Party by Bureau Spectacular, Archeograph by Sam Jacob, Detroit Reassembly Plant by TEAM, and Flatbed Junk by NemeStudio. We evaluated each of the projects’ encoded values as they are presented in the original narratives, as well as the values that can be understood from a surface reading of the image. In each of the projects, we explored hybridizing program, creating new context, appropriating project techniques, questioning scale, and exaggerating/exploiting the original intentions of the projects as methods for making new things from found objects. Our interpretations of each of the projects, and the spatial modifications and new understandings we have assigned to them are as follows.
Pool Party by Bureau Spectacular
Pool Party is meant to be a public relaxation structure. It pays homage to the culture built around pools as a romanticized place of leisure. The inclusion of existing industry-standard pools provides cues to these notions. We speculate a potential 21 day architecture cycle originating from this project will use the elements from the original drawing as a kind of kit of parts, allowing for a reconfiguration of the project in order to take on new program. Some possible iterations include Pool Con, a convention center made from rather unconventional forms of pools; Pool Haus, a single family residence questioning the typical presence of water to private interiors; Traveling Troubadours of Terror, a collection of walking characters in search of the water they have lost; and a Geriatric Water Park, a relaxation space aimed at a more seasoned party crowd.
Archeograph by Sam Jacob
Archeograph is a two dimensional representation of the layering of landscapes, environments and history of Jacob’s neighborhood in London, submitted as part of the 10x10 Drawing London competition. Each of our speculative cycles for this project is a play on the condensed city, exploring different scales at which urban landscapes can be represented and how changing context impacts the reading of the elements originally attributed to London. Peak City explores spatializing the drawing as an entire urbanism. After 21 days this might become Central Pig Pen, which uses the elements to create a dynamic park space for humans as well as pigs, an easily overlooked demographic. Cornice (Tower?) is a single architectural element: a cornice, or maybe it is a skyscraper… hard to say. Archaeotherium turns the drawing into a traveling stage set, meant for performances to be held from any side, maybe multiple at once, maybe even while it’s traveling.
Detroit Reassembly Plant by T+E+A+M
The Detroit Reassembly Plant reimagines the ruins of rundown buildings in Detroit as a source for materials for building the new. Selective demolition of existing structures and insertion of off-site waste materials produced by the city of Detroit allow for the continuation of the Packard Plant as a testing ground for innovative and experimental processes to take place. Our various possibilities for this project come from layering the original projects goals and representation with representation techniques and narratives of other architectural typologies, projects, and even simple architectural things. We reimagined the reassembly plant first as Le Suburbia, the Columbus neighborhood that Hilliard wishes it was. After 21 days it might become Detroit Armchair, a simple 562 piece build, no different than your average IKEA chair. The Diorama Iteration explores the possibility of the thing being merely an architectural model. And finally, we have proposed a contemporary revamp of the 1909 theorem in which one drawing provides the ingredients for several vastly different worlds.
Flatbed Junk by NemeStudio
Flatbed Junk is a project suggesting that the world is being overtaken by junk-space or the endless interior, most of which is encapsulated in a blank exterior. The drawing is representative of a satellite view of a large building which uses the flattened reading of junk to hide uniform architectural content within. The possible cycles of this project reconceptualize the original narrative to either exaggerate or reject the idea of an endless interior, and explore the ideas of junkiness. Sometimes this materializes as an interior shown as a continuous exterior, like in Mechanical Contents, or as a literal Junk Yard. Blocs o’ Bla explores junkiness as a means of building, appropriating First Office’s intentionally inaccurate construction method, while Phun Haus utilizes those flat textures and colors to develop a series of differentiated extremes. A perfect scene for a viral parkour video shot.
