Senior Projects ︎ Spring 2020

Zepur Avanesian Marchland: The Museological Occupation of a Border

Since the invention of the first public art museums, in the late 18th century, architecture has maintained a relatively untested dynamic to the works of art that it hosts, despite the radical proliferation in art disciplines, as well as mediums and scales of production. One stands in front of an intimate Dutch still life painting at the Louvre in much the same way that one experiences Anish Kapoor’s Leviathan in the Grand Palais. As works of art have tested their formal diversity and size, the exhibition spaces within museums have grown larger, but few acknowledge or accommodate the experience of viewing large scale works of art. Part of the reason for this unchanging affiliation between art object and space of exhibition has been the accommodating expectation of architecture in this programmatic relationship, but what if architecture could play a generative role in the production of art objects? This project proposes the creation of an episodic, large-scale museum of buried galleries, sited along 2.5 miles of the border between Armenia, and the newly independent country of Artsakh. The range of scales, geometries, and atmospheres among the galleries will provide artists with opportunities to create site specific works within the contested condition of a political border.

Lianna Bagdzhyan Spatial Papers

Wallpaper could be defined as a two-dimensional, planar surface that delivers a one-sided graphic transformation to a space. This thesis will explore a translation of wallpaper from its two-dimensional nature into its three-dimensional possibilities through the making of graphic and optical experiences. The five wallpapers of a traditional 1940’s single family home will be dissected into layers by color and shape, and manipulated to revisit programmatic and communicable settings throughout a home. Social space, privacy, and the performed actions of domestic functions will be considered throughout the distribution of the wallpaper patterns and spatial capacities.

Sidaq Gill Soft Separation

Rudolf Schindler built a house for him and his wife, as well as another married in couple and their children in 1922, following a camping trip to Yosemite and close on the heels of the 1918 outbreak of Spanish Influenza. The project sought to formalize the experiences that the group had had living in canvas tents apart from clocks and schedules, and to assert a radical declaration of personal space, where each member of the house had their own undifferentiated room to do with as they pleased. Nearly a century later, we are facing a comparable global pandemic, and questions of physical boundary, cohabitation, and domesticity abound. This thesis seeks to revisit the site, both physical and conceptual, of the Schindler House in West Hollywood, and to renegotiate the terrains of boundary, surface, containment, visibility, and community through the material possibilities of textile logics.

Brittney Valadez Continental Harbor

Much of the paper architecture of the 1960’s and 70’s, made use of collage as a method for exploring utopian ideas or to take up critical positions on culture and society. Groups like Archigram and Super Studio employed the techniques of displacement, decontextualization, and juxtaposition in their collagic work to produce visions of consumerist cities, technological regimes, and urban narratives, but few of the visionary proposals from that time addressed issues of interiority. This project will reinvest in the formal techniques and methodologies of collage to create an imagined world arising from questions of pandemic and quarantine as they bear on issues of interiority and community.