In Search of a Thesis
Our class had a deadline today for an in-progress rough draft of our thesis paper. The class is taught by Peter Lunenfeld, and in a meeting with him, it became clear to both of us that I had not yet honed in on a specific critical position on media+architecture. What about it? Is it a good thing? Bad? I had actually known this problem for while, but wasn’t able to arrive at a decent argument and instead chose to keep experimenting with materials and effects.
While we were talking, I remembered that the development of my thesis project had looked at skins vs. volumes as physical forms of media-inflected architecture, and it made sense to isolate that dichotomy as possible conceptual territory. So much of media-inflected architecture today is ‘moving paint’ (as Peter calls it) that only lives on the surface of the skin. What are ways to extend it’s territorial reach, into the building or out into the open? Perhaps it shouldn’t be a vertical surface but a volumetric construction.