Working Title, Cornell University Bachelor of Architecture Thesis
2023 - Built
Ithaca, New York
In collaboration with Aishah Alhady
Award(s): William S. Downing Thesis Prize
The act of building and of making itself is a form of knowledge production. By proposing a way of building that aims at a working process rather than a final product, and personally living with the discomfort and failure inherent in this proposition, we sought to uncover a heuristic and empathetic mode of architectural education which occurs at the intersection of academia and practice.
To accomplish this, we compressed the assumed project timeline of designing, building, and living into a single moment. We worked as the architect through drawings, as the builder through building itself, and as the occupant through a journal of our daily lives. Each of these roles and their associated tools became equally real lenses for informing our approach. The project evolved through any tool in any order, an intervention as likely to be conceived in the writing as the drawing or the building.
As a point of departure, we proposed a ten foot by ten foot by ten foot cube, accepting Dom Haans van der Laan’s thesis that shelter begins with a roof, to protect the body from the elements, and that architecture begins with the wall, to demarcate the rituals of daily life within the infinite vertical and horizontal plains we find our bodies.
The structure is assembled by framing along the seams of plywood offcuts. The reuse of scrap material provided a constructed found condition to react to once occupancy began. The building was then covered in roofing tar, which not only sealed it from the elements but provided an apt allusion to the theatrical black box, a tabula rasa for a variety of unprecedented interactions.
Over the course of the experiment, such an elemental existence and its closeness to nature allowed ample time for reflection. We drew elements, made them, and redrew them. We gained empathy for the arduous task of building. We wrote about our discomforts and designed solutions to the best of our ability. Sitting with what we had done through the cycles of passing days and seasons and in weather both welcoming and brutal allowed us to see the results of our own making intimately, with honest eyes.
Louis Kahn has said that architecture “must begin with the unmeasurable, must go through measurable means...and in the end must be unmeasurable.” We hope, on our best days, our process not only came from, but produced, the unmeasurable.
