Contemporary architecture can be bracketed within two pathogenic extremes: anorexia and obesity. Think of the all-glass, seemingly vacant, apple cube and our ‘relentless pursuit of excessive thinness’, our deep desire to make it disappear into immateriality. Now, think of Gehry’s Bilbao, as the ‘abnormal accumulation of fat’, or the over-materialization of form as a means to achieve iconicity. Architecture is inherently fat, though – Material; Massive; Voluminous.
Architecture must finally become unapologetically fat, Voluptuous. The term is itself charged with historical and cultural significance: It stands for a counter-aesthetic notion of resistance to the infinite quest for thinness. It refers to seeking beauty through imperfection.
Forming a proposal for architecture to become voluptuous, is about reimagining antiquated notions of kallos revolving around ideals of metrics and proportions, questioning ethics of reduction and hyper-articulation, liberating architecture from its longstanding battle with gravity and specificity.
That does not mean that the line is jettisoned, or the curve embraced. Rethink architecture as a bottom heavy construct -- barely escaping symmetry, succumbing to gravity and being legibly informed by its forces. Seeking an extremely balanced aesthetic condition, incessantly negotiating surface and massing, austerity and lavishness, the complex and the monolithic, the beautiful, the weird, and the grotesque.


* Some Great (non-Greek) Architectural Talent made the production of these models possible: Matthew Bertsch and Gabriel Fries Briggs (large scale office tower), Yshai Yudekovitz and Trudy Watt (dress), Debbie Chen (office tower iterations), and Antonia Weiss.

CV