Connor Gravelle, Johan Wijesinghe

Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc)
Design Studio 2015
Faculty: David Freeland

This project fundamentally questions the immediate legibility of a piece of architecture through subtle manipulations in formal organization, surface treatment and circulation.

To these ends, it takes up the contemporary project of the art museum as a platform to question the project of iconicity, reducing the legibility of the work of architecture itself beyond the immediate ability of perception.

By withholding reading rather than privileging it, the project becomes impossible to understand through one human vantage, geometrical orientation or specific depth. This invites certain tactility to the subject hood one experiences when encountering the building.

Those who gaze across the façade are practically required to adjust their position towards the building in order to gain a more complete comprehension of its geometry.

Unable to be perceived in a singular vision, the multiplicity of readings produced by the façade initiates a deep questioning of geometry. An intentional set of choreographed overlaps between the building’s seven “objects” employ shifting material definitions and incongruent geometrical principles alongside architectural tropes such as a shadow or corner to provoke an uncertainty about what one perceives.

While one surface may have a diagonal hatching, rendered in deep slices along its run, an adjacent surface might have another orientation while matching the slice direction. This dichotomy between surface identification and what we have come to expect from architecture (in terms of the façade, ground and roof) combine less than conjunctly in order to estrange the individual from their egocentric perspective onto the building.

Explicated on the interior, this takes host in an intertwined procession of spaces that at times celebrates the difference between objects and at others obfuscates such understandings.