Category: ARCH 502a: FACE VALUE

In exploring the intersection of art, architecture, and perception, this thesis investigates the creative integration of 2D photo collage techniques to construct a 3D dimensional representation. By strategically overlapping multiple photographs taken at the same location and magnifying key elements such as location, architecture info, and symbols, the collage piece employs visual hierarchy to highlight significant architectural details. The 2D photo collage becomes a plan for constructing a 3D dimensional portrayal of architecture aesthetics and information. Through its dynamic portrayal of space and perception, these pieces embody the essence of architectural cubism, inviting viewers to reconsider their understanding of the built environment.

The Decontextual uses photographic abstraction as a generative tool to reconsider and reevaluate architectural spaces and representation. Inspired by a curated selection of architectural photographs depicting interiors and specific details or cropped moments of spaces, rather than overall depictions of rooms or building exteriors, led to a perspective-based approach to designing. Emphasis is placed on smaller scale architectural moments such as apertures, thresholds, and corners specifically composed to focus attention on elements that might otherwise go unnoticed. Buildings are designed from inside to out through evaluating how these moments interact with color, light, and shadow. The final product is presented entirely via photographed interior perspective images in order to generate new narratives about familiar places and challenge conventional notions of architectural representation.

The facade is our first impression of a building. An exterior elevation can help us infer what our experiences will entail before we even step inside OR it can mask what awaits. At USC, we have signage that tells us exactly what the building is, creating an environment where the facade is more aesthetic than informational. USC has placed importance on maintaining a visual language through duplicated facades. The result is a first impression which is repeated over again until the campus becomes a conjoined blur. Face First seeks to disrupt this recurrence through re-writing the campus design guidelines that dictate our facades. A sneaky way to remix and redeploy governing systems may yield a campus that maintains branded continuity while also updating and refreshing our architectural landscape.

Mid-century Hawaii witnessed architectural innovation through Tropical Modernism, combining modern aesthetics and tectonics with Hawaii’s diverse cultures and environments. However, these innovations and values seem to be lost today. Urban development pressures continue to favor impersonal high-rise towers functionally detached from nature and uninspired by culture. How can we revive and evolve Hawaii’s sense of place taking into consideration modern living and environmental demands? Learning from the architects of Hawaii’s past, how can we pioneer new architectural technologies at this scale and create spaces grounded in nature, community, and cultural heritage?

As we’ve grown accustomed to the uniformity of the suburban neighborhood, we’ve also become increasingly more aware of its successes and failures as a model for domestic bliss. While once symbolizing the iconic image of the post-war American Dream, tensions over financial models, accessibility, and diversity have left these single family homes ready for design re-evaluation and speculation as each generation faces new definitions of family and household needs. Unboxing positions itself among previous artistic and architectural speculations offering alternative suburban perspectives. It acknowledges the trappings of conformity and melancholy underlying many of the picture perfect suburban representations and proposes a reconstructed suburban “model home” that prioritizes re-connecting families and individuals to nature, health, and their community.

Here and There yields superimposition as a tool to re-imagine existing structures and create meaningful engagement with their history and context. By layering memory and program through spatial interventions, the project splices together old and new frames of history, resulting in unexpected and dynamic spaces. As a case study, Casa del Desierto Harvey House in Barstow, California, demonstrates how superimposition activates a building and invites people to better engage with its spaces while creating memories through its historical echoes. The process re-contextualizes the original programs of the building through a contemporary lens, providing a new way to experience the past and present simultaneously.

Spaces that are designed to be documented and published are integral to the contemporary consumption of architecture. No matter the medium or method of documentation – pop culture, publications, journalism, social media etc, the impact of photogenic design in our current age is so critical it must be considered at the earliest stage of design conception. Rather than contribute to the flattening of design culture often perpetuated by the algorithm of social media, No Bad Angle seeks to use camera-ready design to test new strategies for reviving and rebranding infrastructure that can benefit from increased viewership and users. The Los Angeles Metro, a still burgeoning system in a city dominated by the car, is the optimal foundation for a redesign. No Bad Angle imagines a metro system that invites riders in through image ready design only to find an expanded experience of LA that reaches far beyond its visual identity.

The Island Meanguera is experiencing cultural erasure through its development. By following the development of the Island, therein lies a series of cultural memories embedded in the urban fabric. El Sabor De La Isla acknowledges the relationship of time and memory to architecturally represent the coexistence of the past, present, and future in a single space.This juxtaposition of the past with the present can then be used to imagine future scenarios for the Island’s development, reasserting the importance of memory in space- that spaces may change, but memories will always remain.

Society follows a pattern of creating spaces according to gender-power relations. The feminine is historically trivialized and marginalized in the architectural realm. Traditionally, this manifests at its strongest in domestic spaces. Uncanny Orders calls out such relations by proposing alternative means of creating domestic furniture. Familiar ready-made pieces associated with certain rituals are reappropriated according to new concepts of efficiency, freedom, and familiarity. Presented via The dollhouse, a traditional teaching tool, allows for the testing, engagement, and perhaps unintended consequences of these new objects.

Paired Moments inserts geographic diptychs into the built environment that highlight the juxtaposition of culture and displacement created through ethnic dispersion. Focusing on the Armenian community of Artsakh and the ethnic cleansing they have endured, these designed spaces marry forms and materiality symbolic of Armenian culture within their new American landscape ultimately fostering integration into an adopted environment. These moments give the diaspora an opportunity to experience the region of Artsakh, which is no longer accessible to the Armenian community. Through enhanced thresholds into cultural spaces throughout Glendale, California, residents are able to reconnect with parts of their identity and history, preserving and restoring traditions and landscapes previously lost.