Program as Thesis

Define the role of program relative to the thesis.

Ideological 

speculation that is imaginary or visionary.

Rhetorical 

used for, belonging to, or concerned with mere style or effect.

Gatherer / Collector

to accumulate; increase.

to take by selection from among other things; sort out; cull.

to bring together or assemble from various places, sources, or people; collect gradually.

to learn or conclude from observation; infer; deduce.

Typological

a systematic classification or study of types.

classification based on the comparative study of types.

The thesis operates between the rhetorical and the gatherer. Through assembling and re-arranging data, its role morphs between the factual and the narrative. Perverting conceived truths and questioning history the thesis deduces common knowledge to mere speculation. Its role is to re-present political and historical moments, to question the terms on which our society is operating. To allow for a spatial interpretation of fact.

Define the role of the client(s) in the thesis, especially as relative to the author. 

User

Audience 

Witness

Accomplice

The thesis targets the accomplice, as we have all been submissive and complacent in accepting what has been presented as fact. We are all at fault for not questioning, re-writing, and provoking for new memories. We are all accomplices in accepting fact as fact.

Program Brief

Book- Maps (data analysis), Historical Narratives

Installation- Responds to the book as a full scale installation with a ‘realization’ as the goal, not an installation of projective solutions or produced work but a material, objectified reaction to the terms developed in the thesis.

As John McMorrough argues that program implies an agency wither social, political, and operational. He faults program as limiting, describing it as “constitution and over-proscription; it alternates between an avocation of arrangement and a surplus of such arrangements.” This program doesn’t act as a project brief, but a project on architecture. Drawing from disciplines of statistics, cartography, art, and architecture the work alters our understanding of space. It works with facts, re-positions them, and allows the individual to re-interpret. It takes two dimensional charts of data and works at the human scale to spatially understand the data in question.  I question McMorrough’s comparison of function being equivalent to program. While the program may dictate how a building functions, the case of function is dependent on the client/user. In relevance to this thesis the function is somewhat irrelevant, function may even be a fantasy. Its purpose is contingent upon the personal reaction and provocation in relation to the spatial cues. 

“To continue to operate on program is to work on the limits of architecture’s interface with the world. To accept the demands of program on its own terms is to allow for an architecture (as a project, both as individual instance and disciplinary collective) that enacts the possibilities of its own withdrawal.”