Post-Object Form

Architecture's contemporary relevance is tied up with the precarious role of objecthood in today’s material culture. The world of things can no longer be described through discrete, auratic objects, as it could before modernism. This pre-modern notion of objecthood has been interrogated by machine production, which elevated the constituent parts over the whole; by mass production, which multiplied the object ad absurdum; and by planned obsolescence, which rendered what was once coveted, entirely disposable. Today, a cult of abstraction sheds ever-new light on the diminishing relevance of objecthood in the design and reception of architectural form. Unprecedented levels of visual literacy in industrialized cultures allow audiences to read a depth of information within the two-dimensional, and to quickly transcribe the three-dimensional into flat representational space in their mind's eye. The object has fled the scene, leaving representation and reality to flicker freely in architectural space.

 

Grounding these considerations in the world of sports, this project pushes at the contemporary vulnerabilities of the architectural object by collapsing architectural form into the space of its own representation. The design of athletics facilities is bound to a set of international standards that inscribe the movement of bodies and equipment in space. However, with a glance at the full range of actions that play out on these standardized volumes and planes, object-form quickly proves inadequate. In this project, volumes unfold, planes slip past one another, and color projects from one surface to the next. Crucially, color — a property of perception rather than of objecthood — takes precedence over volumetric inscription. As a result, spaces present themselves in relation to one another—choreographed elements become present or recede into the background with respect to a subject’s particular route. Form doesn’t dissolve with the loss of objecthood; instead, it becomes a much more active presence in the everyday.