Tag: Class of 2020

The FIRM is a practice that facilitates guerilla urbanism that people can adopt and adapt in their respective urban environments. The practice provides the groundwork and basis for proactive, subversive urban change. The FIRM believes in undermining authoritative figures, groups, and institutions in favor of the people.

The FIRM is a referential guide that exists as a background entity maintaining a separation from the consumers and revoking the need for practice recognition. Additionally, the practice does not demand constant activity but maintains constant availability (digitally).

The FIRM is interested in recoding urban spaces rather than rebuilding. The practice sees value in as-built urban conditions and considers the destruction of urban spaces an authoritative action. The practice looks at bottom up architecture’s methods and interventions that produce architecture that circumvents the regulations and rules of governing urban bodies.

Beta Nature is a practice that serves to act as a architectural mediator between people and the natural environment. It is our task to imagine and propose new forms of architecture to adapt to these climatic transformations and cultural changes that are quickly unfolding in the current post-anthropocene era. It is an urgent matter to re-engage the relationship through the investigation of post digital technology in order to both deliberately acknowledge and accept the future of earth’s atmosphere and environment and to further maintain the consumption of nature through enmeshed virtual and material forms for the coexistence of nature and architecture with higher ideals and values. It stresses the importance of exploration of complex interaction between the real and the virtual in which the natural elements are inhabited and enhanced technologically through the adaptations and modulations of experiential scenes, surfaces, and spaces.

Game-Game is an architectural practice that is thought of like a game. The purpose of the practice is to help architects to bridge the gap between the architectural world and the general public. In this architectural practice, architects are game designers, and the public are players. The game allows the public to have agency over how architects practice. While doing so, the public gains access to the inner world of architectural practice.

Contemporary practice is often presented as a spectacle characterized by “highlight reels” of curated Instagram profiles, polished websites, exhibitions of finished work, curated “WIPs,” romanticized renderings, edited Pinterest images, and clean worksurfaces. This emphasis on image and presentation has resulted in a sacrifice of agency and stagnation of the discipline, marked by a homogeneity of output and alienation from a wider audience. slice of practice_ is situated as a response to the current state of image and representation. It values the day to day, the mundane and naturalistic over the spectacle, and erotics over hermeneutics. The slice of practice_ exhibition at the Geffen Contemporary at MOCA is a performance of the “Let’s Practice” studio of Spring 2020. It looks to address questions around the current state of contemporary practice, exhibition, and representation.

Among the various means that the digital has begun to influence architecture, PORTAL is interested in the intersection and the translation of the digital into the physical and vice versa. As the practice’s name suggests, PORTAL acts as a gateway between these two worlds. Our curiosities lie in dealing with the notion of authorship when it comes to the process of translation between these two worlds. More specifically, Portal investigates the spectrum of wanted intentions vs actual results. As such our practice is concerned more with the “inaccuracies” or “errors” that are produced as a result of the conversion process. These anomalies or distortions produce a new object entirely, one that blurs the distinction between the concept of the original and the copy.