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Mere-0-logic

Invited Distinguished Professor:

Gilles Retsin.

 

Gabriel Esquivel,  Studio Professor

Stephen Caffey, Assistant Professor of Art and Architecture History and Theory

Texas A&M University

 

Team: Collin Stone, Jayson Kim, Kaylan Betten, Lynn Ng, Luis Romero.

 

As part of the exploration of object oriented ontology as it relates to architecture, our project is part of an architecture which is truly for itself.  There is no subject who has agency over the object as it operates on a flat plane of immanence.  The object does not share any medium of communication with the human onlooker, but exists under its own conditions where it is the qualities of accumulation and complexity.  There is a mereology formed by the constant engaging of the parts in the building, which eludes all human cognition, and remains only under the realm of its own ontology. Due to this condition, the humans' understanding of this mereology is reduced to mere mechanism that becomes its own form of distortion.

 

The exact substance of the object is difficult to conceive, as it is more easily understood as a node of complexity that has the quality of accumulating qualities.  There are no literal nodes of influence or specific forces that act on the object, but the object's complexity and its abilities to distort are fundamental in the substance of the object.  Several systems of articulation form a density of information that is ever increasing in weight, giving the object not a static presence, but a presence that seems to elude what humans can understand in the instance of the present.  This disconnection from the human is evident all throughout the project as it sits atop a plinth, eliminating any mutual ground condition between the human and the object. The entry fully embodies this idea as one is denied visual access to the object as they enter the building from underneath the plinth.  The object conceals itself and does not reveal any information to a participant due to the stark lack of stimulation and absence of surface articulation on its base.  Perched atop this plinth, the object becomes ungrounded, further estranging it from the anthropocentric, which reinforces its respective ontological existence.  Having been removed from any grounded context, the object aggregates into a system of nemat spaces above the plinth, which becomes the quality of porosity.  The system of nemat spaces and, the qualities of the mereology are one in the same, as each cannot exist in the object without the affecting and becoming apart from the nother.  This interaction between these properties results in a complex porosity where certain spaces are reduced to uninhabitable nooks, while others span vastly throughout the object.

 

The object is a collective of void spaces, or other void objects, that all come together to form an assemblage which is the mereology of the building.  It is the act of becoming the assemblage that distorts the geometry of the void spaces.  Distortion is a quality of not the object as a whole, but it is a quality of the mereology itself.  The individual parts of the building all separated out are stark and resolved, but the interaction between them and the formation of their relationships to eachother is the cause of their distortion.  There is no hierarchy to the mereology, as one part refuses to subordinate to the next, for this project merely occupies and reinforces the plane of immanence.  It is only through analysis that we are able to view the distortion from outside the realm of the object, but due to the inconceivable nature of the distorting mereology, it is impossible to understand this quality once inside the object.

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