Issue 02: Invasive Typologies
Written, edited, and designed by architecture students passionate about advancing academic discourse in architecture and its related disciplines, Module is a biannual architectural magazine at the Syracuse University School of Architecture that provides an outlet for emerging undergraduate student authors to engage in critical theoretical conversations on architecture.
As the sun slowly disappears beyond the horizon, apartment windows in Los Angeles glow with the nighttime rituals of families gathering inside the comfort of familiar walls. Only a few blocks beyond the quiet hum of nighttime lies in the shadows the harsh reality of downtown Los Angeles. At the…
A Critique of Convenience Intimacy is not a convenient thing. It requires tedious observation, responsiveness, and sensitivity to change. To feel close and connected with something means to take longer routes, to wait and to sacrifice. We do these things not for our own benefit, but for the love of…
Introduction In the United States, Highways are the arteries of the nation. With this country’s distinct lack of public transit that is found in many other first-world nations, we are forced as a people to traverse unwalkable land in isolated boxes, spreading communities apart. When highways were built in the…
“Rotting simulacra” traces humanity’s architectural estrangement from nature through ten conceptual stages. An elegiac reading of Jean Baudrillard’s 1981 book Simulacra and Simulation, the poem-article hybrid describes the genealogy of architecture by framing it as a disruption on nature’s ability to craft homes for living organisms. Appreciation of natural dwelling…
Architecture that is ubiquitous and transplantable across any environment or context, despite its adaptability, is vacant of expression. The Manifesto “Junk Space” by Rem Koolhaas explores this post extracted world of sprawling disconnected spaces absent of context and meaning. Intertwined conglomerations of consumerism, efficiency, and materialism meld together to become…
Surveillance is not only a network of cameras and data systems—it is built into architecture. Buildings, streets, and urban layouts shape how people move, behave, and interact. Through visibility, circulation, and access, architecture disciplines its occupants. Surveillance spreads through the built environment, embedding control into the spaces we inhabit. Throughout…
Introduction to the Global Market Econ 101 There lies the field of flora, of all of Nature’s creation; the blossoms are the few ephemeral pleasures existing in the strangest of places: high on cliffs, hidden in caves, and cracks of concrete. As if to say that even in the most…
A SISYPHIUS WITH A SOLAR ANUS, UNDER A NEO-LIBERALIST STRUCTURE ABSTRACTThe minds of architectural scholars and workers have always been systematically invaded-in subject to a structural pressure that functions through what Foucault would call Disciplinary Power, as Marx would say the Ideological Force of the Superstructure. It is no longer…
When reflecting upon what we understand about colonialism, the erasure of Mesoamerican architecture is often overlooked as being an effect of colonialism, not a simultaneous change that rippled through Spanish colonies. The ruins and teocallis that stand today are fragments of what we understand as indigenous, Mesoamerican architecture, but they…
Profane Night Night has been a perpetual trouble to human settlement, with night representing at first danger from animals, and then later from people, where it anonymized and provided cover. Humans learn to both fear and appreciate darkness–innovating solutions to its perpetual fall. We began with wood and oil flames,…