los angeles CALIFORNIA
SCI-Arc
Critic: Elena MANFERDINI

Cloud Fabuland is a state of fictitious extravagance and a place where everything is possible.
Life is a performance and you never know if you are looking or looked at, if you are the spectator, the performer, or the creator. It is also possible to be all of the above. Cloud Fabuland is an atlas of ideas that explores performance in all its dimensions, and culminates in an architectural space where aesthetics are thought anew and multilayered programs come into being. The building is both a stage for human performance and a performance in its own right, and the intersections between architectural and human agencies create unexpected realities. In Cloud Fabuland, exposure, representation, and power are reconsidered. The building is divided into four program areas dealing in turn with: immersion and engagement; individuality and catharsis; atmospheres and floating; and theatricality and gesture. Each of these areas unfolds a different set of relationships to contingency and confessionality — the two cores this thesis posits as central to performative experience.
In each space, a set of architectural possibilities is improvised via mass and silhouette, while exterior surfaces are animated via texture and materiality.
Even though the design is quite complex it is carefully calibrated to reach the desired effect. The goal is to oscillate between parts and autonomy, assembly and individuality, interaction and complexity.