Object Lessons:
The Collection

Undergraduate 100D Option Studio, Spring 2016
University of California, Berkeley

Architects are writers of fiction. Fiction writers are told to write what they know. We interact with little things - staplers, radios, whisks, pitchers, teapots – all day, every day. We know about how weight, balance, and material affect our experiences of the small things in our lives, but rarely are we able to apply this instinctive hand-scale knowledge to architecture.

Students in this studio curate a collection and design a home for it. At the outset of the semester, students engage in research to understand the techniques and economies of production that produce objects – at first drawing randomly, then developing focus on a material, means, method, or origin that seems fruitful. By the second part of the semester, they will have collected a body of research that will aid in the development of an attitude toward the collection that informs its architectural surroundings. 

This studio relies heavily on a regimen of experience-based research, an effort to document and catalog fleeting inanimate relationships. Small everyday objects are used as a means to an architectural end, a streamlined and packaged set of finite concerns intended to circumvent and reimagine the usual process of design development.

This studio is about taking functional (and imagined) relationships in one scale and applying them to another, in the process making strange the original context. This studio is also about the strained relationship we have with things, the awkwardness with which we discuss (or avoid addressing) how intimately architecture, belongings, taste, class, and culture are intertwined. It is a reversal of that distrust of objects, a performative embrace of the mundane, the everyday, the off-the-shelf.