adjacencies

cururated exhibit at yale architecture gallery



2018

Adjacencies presents architects educated and entering the discipline just when computational experimentation became ubiquitous. Rather than setting out to dismantle the past, abandon history, or redefine complexity they have worked to expand architecture’s scope, available mediums, and audience. The projects privilege physicality, surprise, playfulness, curiosity, and pleasure in search of a wider public through drawings, details, renderings, photographs, and physical models. Equipped and well- acquainted with the new digital tools while also deeply interested in the breadth of historical knowledge and technique, these offices look to expand territory instead of simply resist or counteract their recent past. These architects sidestepped the poles of extreme computational complexity or reductive Luddite banality in favor of a more progressive strangeness.

They replaced aliens, mutants, and novelty with the vague, generic, almost familiar, allusive, ambiguous, and weird. The reinvestment with history, materiality, representation, and construction opens worlds in which productive trajectories uncover new understandings of architecture’s potential to engage people. This engagement and production of new desires is crucial as it reflects the designers’ ambitions to instigate culture and question our perceived notions of reality. New, alluring worlds beckon through a multitude of elements of all scales including a bathtub, eave detail, bay window, and buildings ranging from the museum to the house to the highway rest stop. Likewise, the building speculations have no overarching style or meta-narrative but unveil an affinity for opportunistically mixing high and low, old and new, familiar and unfamiliar, to find new architectural experiences.