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.
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,…
FROM DEGRADATION TO RENEWAL Once flowing continuously, teeming with diverse and complex life, the Santa Cruz River in Arizona is now dry and desolate, crushed by the human desire to expand and dominate. Prior to western expansion in what is now the Tucson area, the Santa Cruz River supported a…
A NEW INTERPRETATION OF REGGIO’S ‘KOYAANISQATSI’ This magazine defines ‘invasive’ as a systematized and highly competitive overwriting of existing environments, irrespective or perhaps with disrespect to that which was already there. In this case, however, is not every system ‘invasive’? A system or a typology is merely a set of…
Last semester in ARC 107, our studio class was tasked with creating a dwelling inspired by spatial logics of a precedent house. From my precedent, the CIEN House, I utilized ideas like a processionary circulation path to develop the design for a dwelling for a man and his daughter situated…
Farming Depot City is conceptualized as a radical solution and a contested urban fantasy. Through provocatively choreographing the food system and public participation on a limited site footprint, the project attempts to open up a discussion regarding London’s food insecurity, machine production, and human relation to land. The farming depot…
