The primacy of buildings as the outcome of architecture frames models as passing images on their way to being exchanged for real objects. However, models are not committed to reality but rather to challenge it, whether as scaled constructions or frameworks of ideas. As necessary instruments for the imagination of the built environment, they dialectically question the architect’s position as a master builder and author of fantasies.
Three projects comprise the thesis – Table, Wagon, and Toy – studied simultaneously as designed objects within a taxonomy of things and as models unbound by the data of reality. As objects, each project asserts an irrepressible form, directly linked to its pattern of use. However, as models, they become tools for disciplinary understanding and provocations, with each project examining the architectural constants relating to its dual nature. Table: program and infrastructure; Wagon: form and context; and Toy: domesticity and subjectivity.
Each project questions the context and standards of its use. Together, they construct a world where diverging territories can be made whole through the design of a wagon traveling between them and belonging to both; where a dinner table tests the very idea of a building’s structure; where a toy remodels the home through the subjectivity of one of its inhabitants. While the projects exist as solitary endeavors, they comprise one series, allowing their multiplicity to be tested.
Multiplicity does not aspire to reach a product in a state of Real. It opposes the closed object that lacks nothing and is devoid of process. As objects of design, Table, Wagon, and Toy are not parts of a greater whole, but as models, they accumulate into one pedagogy.
Upon the accumulative investigation of the three projects, another is revealed. It acts as a fifth column, a fourth project both within the thesis and the course of the master’s program, embracing the academic prompt to design the brief along with its outcome. Thus, as a subversive force, the Fourth Project undermines the bias towards the Real and the Singular and instead proposes a discipline that produces objects whose value is derived from their potential for connectivity.