Thesis: CMU School of Architecture Exhibition

The 2016 Thesis group - Ball, Dabholker, Gonzalez, Gonzalez, Sterling, Viny and Wulfman - has spent a full year and the Independent Project group - Chan, Clifford, Madigan and Sambamurthy - has spent this Spring semester exploring platforms of contention. Though each of these 5th year students has been working at a different margin of the architectural discipline, threads of ideas weave across from one to the other. Diversions, obstructions and difficulties are to be expected when traversing uncharted territory and the results of their work are exhibited in the Miller Gallery. Here the installations are designed to provoke a conversation in the reviews, and questions abound;

Can architecture undermine power and privilege?
What subtle potential could lie in the biometric control of a sensory interface?
Is social integration responsive to a dynamic toolset in a rural context?
Could a dense urban context be overlaid with incremental, autonomous public space?
How can we find ways to imagine futures for the uninhabitable world?
Is there a new digital/tactile zone of collaborative design?
An architecture of tenuous stability could maybe both receive and issue narrative enactment?
Does dressing form a part of the architecture of couture?
How is the world changed with a soft, squishy architecture?
What does the car leave behind it?
Are we temporary players in someone else’s reality?

It is at times uncomfortable to be walking on the edge of architecture, even in the protected zone of academia. This group has worked to expand our definitions and the results of their leaps of imagination and the rigor of their thinking is both provoking and exciting. We are delighted to be ushering these students into the profession and await the impact of their work as it sends ripples through the establishment.