On The Bias

Date
2013-09-16
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Abstract

Within the typical institution, social patterns are all but solidified: enter off the street, funnel through the grand multi-story lobby, take the elevator, and get to work. Everyone associates together in a single space, and everyone subsequently operates in isolation.

By collapsing two-dimensional urbanism and the three-dimensional institution, the emerging articulated surface has the ability to tear down the boundary between architecture and city and integrate itself with the surroundings by leveraging the common space of interaction in the city—the street. The result is an interruption in the strict patterns of the city as street, side- walk, lot and building are disassembled, circulation is uncoupled, and the ground plane of the gridded city is reconstructed.

Rather than constructing the institution around an all-encompassing connection between all of its publics in equal measure, this thesis sets out to tailor relationships between publics of the institution as well as with the segmented publics outside of it by leveraging a series of internal streets rather than a single, common one. In doing so, particular publics can be paired, specific spatial relationships can be constructed, and generative social relationships can be structured between publics. These streets will be tempered by their relationship to the ground plane and the exterior, the surrounding program, and types of connection. Relationships will not only be structured between urbanism and institution, but also within the imbedded layers of the institution, moving with and against the street.

The institution that most easily encapsulates this condition is the Fashion Institute as it con- tains multiple user groups, or publics, that engage each other in multiple ways. Whether ver- bally, visually, or spatially from lectures to sketches to runways, the institutional discourse is easily penetrated by those publics that exist outside of the institution.

Here, the street is brought into the school and the school is brought to the street.

Description
Degree
Master of Architecture
Type
Thesis
Keywords
Architecture, Buildings, Design, Internal Street, Public, City, Institutions, Fashion Institute, Fashion, Multiple Publics, Articulated surface, Vision
Citation

Tehranian, Alexander. "On The Bias." (2013) Master’s Thesis, Rice University. https://hdl.handle.net/1911/72048.

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