ARC3020Y F
Instructor(s): An Te Liu
Meeting Section: L0106
Tuesday, 9:00am - 1:00pm, 2:00pm - 6:00pm

This Thesis Research Studio begins with objects and leads to an architecture which houses objects. In the French language, a pair of linked terms distinguishes between things and buildings: meuble and immeuble.

meuble: (objet) piece of furniture; (Jur.) movable.

immeuble: (bâtiment) building; (Jur.) real estate 2. Adj. real, immovable.

Meuble commonly refers to furniture and furnishings, or “loose” things. It derives from the latin mōbilis, meaning “movable.” An Immeuble is a building, or real estate, ie., that which is immōbilis or “immovable.” There are your possessions – things you can take with you, and then there is the home, which usually stays.

This studio seeks to blur the boundaries between object and edifice, contents and container, meuble and immeuble. In what ways can object-hood inform buildings? What kinds of innovation could this engender, in terms of form, function, materiality and representation?

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I. Taxonomy, Classification, Artifactual Research

Meuble Immeuble begins with a diverse body of objects from wide-ranging epochs and categories of value or purpose — things old or obsolete, new or futuristic, ordinary and common things, rare or strange things, useful or useless things.

We will arrive at a deeper understanding of the collected items through the application of both traditional systems of classification and the invention of nonstandard taxonomies. What distinguishes one thing from another and how might they be related, in both obvious and unexpected ways?

Insights will be derived through deeper analysis of selected artifact – where it comes from how it has transformed over time (origins/lineage), what it’s for and why it is the way that it is (function, use, type), what it made of and how it is made (technology, economy), and what it tells about the culture in which it was produced and consumed (customs, values, desires).

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II. Depiction, Reinterpretation

Working with selected objects, detailed analyses will examine, apprehend, and reinterpret them in critical and creative ways. Through drawing one can portray, dissect, explode, and reconstrue the thing at hand. Through three-dimensional studies using techniques such as casting and mold-making, one may discover latent properties both within and without the thing at hand. Working between positive and negative, absence and presence, traces and imprints, new spaces and possibilities emerge.

Recombinant operations such as collage, assemblage, and their attendant actions of merging, subtraction, multiplying and reconstitution also serve to decode and recode the thing at hand. Such studies act as catalysts for expanding the formal, spatial, material and semiotic potential of our objects of study. ________________________

III. A Housing, or meuble–immeuble

The object lessons will then be deployed in the design and 1:1 fabrication of a “housing” for a thing, or things. As an object-inspired edifice, it may contain or subsume its object, and serve to store, protect, conceal, display, or transform it. The object may also disappear.

As an experimental meuble–immeuble, it will simultaneously embody aspects of things– furniture– and building–ness. It may be read and experienced at 1:1 (as meuble) but also at other possible scales (as model for an immeuble). As with the studies leading up to it, the housing will possess a high degree of material resolution and attention to craft.

This housing will act as a test site and case study for strategies and sensibilities to be expanded upon in the following Thesis semester, in which you will engage in the detailed design of an architecture to house a collection of things.

You will curate a collection and study it. And in response you will create a building which reflects upon relationships between it and its contents, between object and edifice, meuble and immeuble.