Cheap Wonder, TYP.

Abstract

The materials available on institutional building projects with limited budgets today are not the concrete of Le Corbusier, the bricks of Louis Kahn, the terracotta of Louis Sullivan, or the steel of Mies, instead they are inexpensive building products: sheet-rock, metal studs, gypsum board, and ducting. Instead of determining a building’s overall form and subdividing it into these materials, this thesis focuses on the strange beauty of these building products, mines them for their perceptual and experiential potential, and deploys them to create effects of wonder.

The creation of a sensibility of wonder and vastness has been accomplished already in architecture through the design of large and repetitive spaces on private projects that can afford the material and real-estate. In art, it has been realized with material and labor that serves one function for a short period of time and is visible to an audience already seeking it out. This thesis tests how vastness, luxury, and flicker can be created instead with an economy of means: in small spaces with the material implicit in the flows of ordinary construction.

Through the design of an urban public high school on an ordinary site – a brief that involves default tectonics, practical problems, and a collective fractured by cliques – the project seeks to enchant the tectonics of common materials and to create a diversity of experiences within a singular whole. Can this focus on material effects carve out spaces for collectivity that feel grand and vast but are actually practical, inexpensive, and small?