los angeles CALIFORNIA

SCI-Arc
advisor: Elena MANFERDINI.

suckerPUNCH: Describe your project.

Ömer PEKIN: Nonce Object is an experiment towards the creation of a multitude of readings of an architectural work. A nonce word is a word coined for a singular occasion to solve a communication problem where a nonexistent word is needed. A nonce object is this thesis’ coined term for a new type of formal organization that is indeterminate to the category it fits.

It is an object that consists of more than one objects that works its way toward a new whole without losing the unique attributes of the originating objects it is composed of. This process establishes multiple ways to access or understand a project’s formal ambitions. By oscillating between one whole and an arrangement of multiple wholes, it creates a project that, through the perception of its observer, has a fundamentally unstable status.

sP: What or who influenced this project?
ÖP: I was curious about creating an architectural project that could be understood in multiple ways—no right or wrong. Listening to lectures of Todd Gannon and Andrew Zago also influenced me a lot.

sP: What were you reading/listening to/watching while developing this project?
ÖP: Reading Robert Somol and Sarah Whiting, “Notes around the Doppler Effect and Other Moods of Modernism”; Graham Harman, “The Road to Objects”; and Sylvia Lavin, Kissing Architecture.

sP: Whose work is currently on your radar?
ÖP: Herzog & De Meuron; Aldo Rossi; Casey Reas; and Peter Fischli & David Weiss.