Issue 03: Fluid Constructs
Written, edited, and designed by students passionate about advancing academic discourse in architecture and its related disciplines, Module is a biannual architectural magazine at Syracuse University that provides an outlet for emerging undergraduate student authors to engage in critical theoretical conversations on architecture.
Since Vitruvian time, architecture is the materialization of ideals as much as a symbol of power and hierarchy. The assumption of stability and firmness has fixated the discipline to a self-restraining way of practice, one that compulsively repeats and reinforces the power structure. Design produces flawless geometries freezing in the moment of completion. The language of form struggles to shake off the Euclidean ghost of wholeness and perfection. Yet buildings, like ourselves, are empirical entities subject to material forces and constant change. Through exploring the unstable, fragmented, and contingent nature of architecture, we disintegrate the image of firmitas in place of an alternative conception: fluid constructs.
When an architecture is conceived as still and neutral, the “post-design” and the “unintended” force it to change and adapt. Uses are the core of architecture since its creation, and buildings are always in dialogue with their changing uses. Legal ownerships or creatorships, no matter how extensive, cannot fully own or control a space, as complexity naturally gives ways to unexpectedness. Buildings are then often misused–or how do you define misuse? Fluidity in uses questions the conventional mode of linear, unidirectional creation of architectural objects with cases of continuous creation.
Mobile practices–pop-ups, inflatables, and barricades–raise questions of true and staged agency. Instead of reinforcing, these structures uproot. Their physical instability has the potential to resist and, on the flipside, ease into a form of experience economy of novelty that produces the illusion of adaptability.
Fictions and narratives offer ways of metaphorical re-imagining architecture in flux: architecture becomes the metabolic projection of human bodies, 4th dimensional beings that defies all presuppositions, and the symbol of trauma and transformation in the context of modernization.
An architecture is never “complete.” By handling instability with openness and curiosity, this issue hopes to contribute to an ongoing conversation on the “ongoingness” of architecture.
The Arrow of Innovation and the Wheel of Human Response A cloud is light and fluffy and beautiful, it can be lonesome in the sky or a totalizing pale expanse. When you approach a cloud it dematerializes, its many tiny water molecules might dampen your skin but you can see…
In first year, we are neurologically blinded. It takes one meaningful push through the double doors before the scattering yellow beige melding in visible dust as it rolls down onto each desk from the riveted steel vaults revealing a skylight to nowhere for nothing except as the taut skin of…
A Powerful Wall Against Autocracy The United States of America has a long history of protests, and therefore a long history of local protest architecture. In his book Protest Architecture, Nick Newman lists several intentions and actions something must have to qualify as “protest architecture” which can be summarized as…
When my studio and I visited San Francisco, we pit stopped on the Pacific Coast, along Highway 1, getting out at the landmark site Sutro Baths. I suppose, in a mirthful sped-up homage to the Classical Romans, the Baths have fallen to ruin, sticking out seaside cliffs with its broken,…
Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s 1967 magnum opus One Hundred Years of Solitude revolves around multiple generations of the Buendia family, founder of the city of Macondo. While geographically and temporally indeterminate, the fictional Macondo serves as a stage where architecture and urbanism are informed by real-life Latin American transformations in society…
If you look through the city fabric of Berlin, roughly 1000 acres of infinite open land is placed in the center. It acts as a rupture to the density that surrounds it. Tempelhof Airport, instead of being occupied by aircrafts, is filled with different activity on the tarmac. Basketball courts,…
We Are the Hallway The Dimension That Has No Face We learn to understand reality in layers.The first dimension is a line: an infinite stretch with no width, no height, only direction. The second dimension introduces a plane: a flat surface defined by length and width. The third dimension, the…
