brooklyn NEW YORK
Pratt Institute
Critic: Ostap RUDAKEVYCH and Tulay ATAK

Since then, the theory has gained a degree of resolution through its productive ability to generate marketable concepts, making architecture consumable and accessible.
The problem of the diagram today is that it became too real, literal, simplified and commercialized inasmuch as the diagram became an image and identity for sale. Diagram used to be a tool for managing complex information through abstraction and simplification. The sincerest intention from Somol and Whiting was that the diagram was a“tool that sets into motion the possibility of multiple engagements rather than a single articulation of program, technology, or form” Today, however, even this thought is reduced, simplified and rigorously muted. What you see is what you get is an attitude towards the marketable concept in the diagram that is nothing but a promotion in architectural identity and image- making. In a way the diagram has slipped through the hands of the architect making available to the public, betraying it’s previous complex and analytical edge, towards simplistic, more dogmatic, and ultimately more conservative, at which time its power becomes institutional rather than analytical.
Barbara Johnson says, in Nothing Fails like a Success, that the failure of a theory was symptomatic to the institutionalization, and success of the theory itself. She argues that the loss of critical edge in theory can be regained through setting oneself up to a surprise, accepting the gap in knowledge, embracing the ignorance within which forgetting the conventions developed anterior to the practice we’re rigorously trained to perform. If this is possible, we need to propose, not answers or causes, explanations or origins, but new question and new ways in which the diagrams can be rigorously re-read, re-worked and disciplined.
The thesis proposes an alternative diagram produced through complexity of the line. A series of line which abandons the simplistic, and abstract spatial concepts but engenders complexity of space generated through qualities of the lines. The project sits on a site where the space became reductive. The urban redevelopment plan in Fulton Market has stripped off its quality of the neighborhood to produce marketable identity. In this context, the project is a proposal for new spatial qualities beyond the identity of the context. It translates the historical ecology of meat packing house to a new civic ecology; public bathhouse where the questions of weather emerge new spatial typology and qualities in space beyond the conventional enclosure.

sP: What or who influenced this project?
AK&TX: Pieter Schoolwerth, Waiting room #4 2017.

sP: What were you reading/listening to/watching while developing this project?
AK&TX: We were reading, Somol and Whiting :“Notes around the Doppler Effect and Other Moods of Modernism” MOS, A Situation Made from Loos. Barbara Johnson, Nothing fails like success.
We were listening to Agar Agar “Lost dog” from the album “The dog and the future”, a lot of trash punk, and really lame 2000’s pop.
Stacy’s mom by Fountains of Wayne
Stacy’s mom by Bowling for Soup

sP: Whose work is currently on your radar?
AK&TX: Pieter Schoolwerth, Peter Wolfendale