NOTES ON: MATERIALITY, TEMPORALITY, AND THE INTERIOR

January 2021
Master’s Thesis
Advisor: Troy Schaum

American building culture is readily available, easy to consume and digest. Typical construction methods uphold a ubiquitously and unequivocally standard image of American building culture today—predicated on fastness and cheapness, but with little regard to buildings’ lifespans. Many single family homes today, for instance, are not made to last longer than a generation. What if everyday materials merge with conventional building techniques to produce a familiar-yet-unfamiliar material expression for an architecture that embraces, rather than deceives, its lifespan?

Inspired by camp sensibility as a "consistently aesthetic experience of the world," this project questions the simultaneous role of everyday materiality, architectural temporality, and the domestic interior in an age of material excess. Using paper pulp and cardboard, two end-of-stream waste products ripe for material reuse, the project proposes a material and temporal language—one that relies on artifice as a means of performance—for an architecture of living/consuming.