Fall 2018, Arch 100C – Odd Families

Interior space has swallowed the earth. Some call it the endless interior. Others question the contemporaneity of this condition and claim that it has always been about the interior and that we simply did not know it. After all, they say, what we call territory is nothing more than a kind of planetary interior. Thinking of the giant air-conditioned interiors of warehouses, self-storage buildings, flower markets, art museum, and library archival storage facilities, convention centers, data centers, and distribution centers. There is more to these interiors beyond their immense scale and ubiquity, however. First is their specific architectural manifestation of accumulation. As containers of an exponentially growing multiplication of cabinet of curiosities, they are contemporary monuments of constant collecting, accumulating and trashing of “stuff” (goods, artifacts, material), simply all that is junk of “junk-space”. Second, despite the piles of material that they contain, their exterior is almost always blank. The objective of this studio is to speculate on alternative potentials for the relationship between the container and the contained through the design of a building that stores goods, artifacts, or material and contains an additional program of living, work, or exhibition. The students will test these ideas at the scale of the interior detail, at the scale of the building, and the scale of the larger territory.