Architecture / Interior Architecture Reflections

 

The thesis projects presented here share a commitment to the architecture of thought as much as the architecture of things. Asking new questions and raising concerns relevant to the discipline of design and architecture at this moment requires a willingness to explore contingent, fluid and often precarious conditions with the import of pluralistic and interdisciplinary approaches in the research through design process. This moment of making things public is part of our culture of Thinking, Making and Sharing at SAIC and represents concerns relevant to the disciplines of architecture and design by each of our graduates. As such, most of the thesis explorations are propositional rather than solution-driven and manifest through the concerns being raised and the open-ended ideas that are being explored.

Hennie Reynders, PhD, Professor of AIADO

 

The Worlds We Build – Designed Objects Reflections

 

The Worlds We Build, is the culminating exhibition of the year-long thesis project by the Master of Design, Designed Objects class of 2022. The designers and artists in this exhibition are building worlds that are imagined, altered, reconfigured. Theirs are projects created during an extraordinarily insular period of development that each address important collective and personal issues. While some projects have made attentive amendments to existing problems, others have reconfigured entire environments to arrive at new possible realities. Considering how we live, learn, travel, interact and commune has been central to many through thoughtfully executed models, interactions, and environments that allow visitors to not only view but also participate. Speculating on our accelerating future state, urgent questions have been confronted to consider how our increasingly blurred digital and physical experiences might be interpreted in the form of performances, programs, and products. Researching histories of craft, place and identity, others thoroughly complicate notions of technology through acts of making to radicalize existing paradigms and expose alternate potentialities.

 

As a thoroughly united class made up of distinctive perspectives and experiences, their work suggests that it is perhaps not a binding tension that propels us forward, but rather, the subtle investigations, playful narratives and haptic interactions that form the foundations for the worlds we build.

Designed Objects Faculty: Jim TerMeer Associate Professor, Martha Poggioli Lecturer, and Eric Allan Hotchkiss Assistant Professor, Adjunct