AND I AM BUILDING IT.
A Manifesto
GRAD 7090, DESIGN THESIS
FALL 2025 & WINTER 2026
What I remember from a building is different from
what the plans say; But which one is real?
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Theoretical Ground
Morton proposes we abandon the idea of nature as background, as environment, as something framing human activity. Instead,we should recognize what he calls the mesh — an interconnected field where nothing exists independently, where everything is entangled, where boundaries between inside and outside, nature and culture, dissolve.
Bachelard argues that this division —this certainty about what's inside and what's outside — is phenomenologically false. The house is not a container separating us from the world but a nest of relationships between shelter and exposure, enclosure and openness.
Language is reduced to pure phonetic material.What begins as written observations of nature progressively dissolves back into the acoustic environment Thoreau was documenting.
Pauses function as active material. Silence is measured, rhythmic, deliberate. Time becomes visible through spatial arrangement.
- Kraft Paper Drawing
“Ecological awareness is
a practice of paying attention to the between, to what connects rather than what separates.”
Architectural space isn’t about clear boundaries, but about thresholds, corners, intimate recesses.
- White Paper Drawing
It is aboutthe relationship between a subject and a space, (specifically about what happens to that relationship when the subject undergoes a fundamental metamorphosis.)
The building became a measuring instrument for a transformation I could not yet name. What I needed to draw was not the walls or the columns or the structural grid.
I needed to draw the event itself,
the gap between the self that had left
and the self that returned,the in-between,the Third Space, the charged interval where two worlds, two selves, two political realities meet and cannot be reconciled.
What if the thing you need to draw is precisely what the line cannot contain?
Subtraction turned out to be a more honest method for a project about loss and transformation, about a self that had something taken from it, a familiar world that had been partially erased by what it witnessed.
The erased drawing holds the ghost of what was there.
The act of erasing is not destruction; It is a form of listening, a way of asking what remains when the habitual mark is taken away,when the architectural convention is stripped back, when the line that always wants to decide is finally interrupted.
- Silhouettes
- (Mis)using Technology
We remove people from plans. We remove duration from sections. We draw a building as if it exists in a moment of perfect, uninhabited stillness.
The 3D laser scanner operates under the same assumption. Its conventional use requires that the subject leaves — stands aside, maintains the detachment that allows clean measurement. Everything must be frozen. No movement. No body.
The scanner, like the plan, requires the observer to be separate from the observed.
I participated in the event rather than evacuating it — and in doing so I became the event.
What the scanner produced was not a clean point cloud of an empty room.
It produced a record of entanglement — the data of the space and the data of my body moving through it, inseparable, the tool's foundational assumption structurally violated.
Looking through glass, it treated reflections as real objects — it could not distinguish between the interior of CAST and its reflection in the window.
The inside and outside collapsed into a single point cloud. The tool that was supposed to produce clarity produced entanglement.
Morton's mesh, made visible by a machine that was trying to do the opposite.
The scans removed the materiality of the space.
A brick wall, a glass surface, the air between them, my own body — in the point cloud they are all the same. They are all just points. They carry no weight, no texture, no temperature, no specific material identity. The scan does not know the difference between glass and flesh, between concrete and atmosphere.
Everything is reduced to the same fundamental condition — matter in space.
The boundary between me and the building is not a boundary between two different kinds of thing. It is a boundary between two expressions of the same matter.
There is only matter, and the boundaries we draw between its expressions are conventions, not facts.
The scan is the most honest drawing I have made in this investigation — and I made it by misusing the tool.
- The Cyanotype — The Subject in the Print
The reason for this choice follows directly from what the scanner investigation revealed. To send the scans to a printer would have been to repeat the same structural problem at the level of presentation — removing the subject from the process of making the image.
By making the cyanotype prints myself I remained inside the event of representation.
I, the subject, participated in making the image — the same way I participated in the scan by walking through it.
- The Installation
the installation elements, all together
cyanotype prints are placed in the space not as documentation but as drawings in a different register — the same investigation conducted through a different body, a different duration, a different set of hands.
The curtain is made of four layers of transparent fabric. The projection passes through all four layers simultaneously, each layer receiving and scattering the light differently, so that the image is not flat but has depth and atmosphere — the point cloud suspended in the space rather than printed on a surface.
kraft paper and white paper roll drawings + layered drawings
One of the scans is projected onto the glass from inside. When you stand outside CAST and look at the window, you see three things simultaneously: the projection of the scan — the building's own point cloud, the record of its inability to maintain its boundary.
The interior of CAST through the glass — the actual space, the building as it is. And your own reflection — yourself, the subject, the event. All three on the same surface. The window that was supposed to separate inside from outside is now holding all three registers at once. Nobody is erased. The boundary has not disappeared. It has become the site where everything meets.
The interior of CAST through the glass — the actual space, the building as it is. And your own reflection — yourself, the subject, the event. All three on the same surface. The window that was supposed to separate inside from outside is now holding all three registers at once. Nobody is erased. The boundary has not disappeared. It has become the site where everything meets.