“Y&Z Fuzzy Facets” engages the issue of defamiliarization. The mixed‐use building complex located on the site of the World Trade Center building in Downtown Los Angeles utilizes the plinth of the old building as a socially, culturally, and geometrically familiarized object on top of which it sits and rises as a new whole composed by high‐rise towers that resist geometrical description.
The new building achieves an object condition provoking double or multiple readings of itself to the spectator, as Object Oriented Ontology proposes in works such as Graham Harman’s Weird Realism. First, an allusive technique is used in the massing exercise. Volumes are carved in order to achieve fuzziness and uncertainty in the mass, which contributes to transmit the notion of general outline enticing some familiarity.
On a second instance, a more cubist technique is used to break down the several parts of the object. The towers acquire texture by using a projection technique. An occlusion rendering of their own masses is projected orthographically in both Y and Z axis in order to elucidate a variety of conditions such as offsets, misfits, and gaps produced when applied onto their irregular facets. Texture becomes instrumental rather than ornamental by becoming the result of a generative play of a collection of familiar architectural elements such as curtain walls windows, to reminisce Mies van der Rohe in the Chicago Federal Center,
or to Phillip Johnson in Pennzoil Place; or similarly through ‘verandas’ to reminisce Le Corbusier in the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts.
Made with Rhino, Maya, and V-Ray.
Program: SCI-Arc M.S. Architectural
Technologies
Course: Studio, Fall 2014
Tutor: Marcelo Spina
Research: Speculative Design, Object Oriented
Ontology, Representation,
Digital Fabrication
1. 90° Axonometric Oblique Elevation
2. Plan Oblique Site Drawing
3. One Point Perspective Elevation
4. Side and Front Elevations
5. Orthographic Worm Eye View
6. Orthographic Close Up View
7. Textured Powder-3d Print Model Photos
