ARCH 501: Adventures in the Algorithmic Ordinary and/or Odd Operations on the Everyday

Dream Mall is a project proposal for the renovation of the abandoned Hawthorne Plaza Mall in Hawthorne California, which incorporates elements of different American mall aesthetics over time, such as the beloved browns and oranges from the 70s and 80s, vaporwave and neon aesthetic colors from the 80’s and 90’s, as well as contemporary mall building aesthetics. Additionally, for the mall to be truly “dream-like”, it will feature a wide variety of themes and features that include irony, subversion, and perversion. Each of the retail stores, as well as the dining and entertainment venues, are all thematized and they all have a “catch”, such as a restaurant where everything is purple, and the black store where everything is white, which is adjacent to the white store where everything is black. When combined with entertainment venues such as skateboarding and mini golf, this mall aims to provide a fun, zany experience for kids and young adults, while also serving as a venue for socialization and art exhibits.

Architecture of the built environment (and reality in general) is overwhelmingly ordinary. This ordinariness is represented through a range of architectural expressions: the generic, the copy, the perfunctory, the banal, the useful, the bare logics of capitalism, etc. The identity of American architecture in particular has been built on the ordinary. Algorithms underlie much of current architectural production in the form of instructions, and packages of commands which follow logic driven formulas of optimization, economic constraints, codes, and cultural standards. We might say that we are beginning to live in a post-algorithmic age, one in which everything is reducible to a set of instructions with particular goals in mind. The recent popular emergence of AI evidences a new world in which the algorithm reigns supreme – from producing texts to making images and videos to speculating on new forms of physical reality. We find ourselves at an interesting moment in time. A weird moment. There is little doubt that all of this will have profound effects on the practice, design, and the production of architecture. Our interest here though, is not in optimization and standards (which are well understood) but looking at the strange and enchanting interactions between the ordinary and the algorithmic.