Superlative Designs

The term is often applied to shops offering items of apparel, where the shop is intended less to transact profitable sales than to promote demand for the goods and thereby produce profitable business at other locations, or in modes other than walk-in stores.

What is anxiety? How does it manifest? Can architecture and design work through the lens of domesticity to aid and even cure anxiety disorders? Anxiety disorders plague close to 7% of Canadians aged 15-64 according to the Public Health Agency of  Canada, and at present the most frequent treatment is anxiolytics, a term for drugs that are chiefly used to treat anxiety. A prior study of liminal spaces gave rise to an idea that these transition zones represented a common trigger to many anxiety disorders, especially those involving being out in society, such as agoraphobia. This link between many anxieties and society, or the ‘outside’ world, informed the basis for a scenario where a domestic environment could protect the inhabitants from their anxieties, while at the same time working to promote self reliance and growth. Again, the liminal spaces are given special consideration, for their pivotal point of flux represents the specific times when anxiety, either conscious or unconscious, begins. Liminal spaces can be seemingly erased with flow through a space, or drawn out to become a space unto themselves. Perceptions can be altered. Inside can become outside; an exit can become an entryway.  When society becomes an infection, domestic life and architecture can be the stabilizing force, connecting body, space, and object, in a way no other environment can. 

Peter Zumthor

Examine the effects of a disaster. Create a site analogue. Propose a shelter that explores how physical and formal apparatuses can re-engage post-trauma conditions, either as infrastructure and/or temporary setups, and how it can foster new opportunities within displacement and destruction.

Examine/discuss the context of the city and the Boston’ Fort Point Channel and develop strategies in engaging a ‘remote’ context, understanding its possibilities and limitations. Explore possibilities of ‘retooling’ the barge as a public space, with SENSORIAL EXPERIENCES.

Carefully observe, reflect and discuss the ‘use’ and ‘useless’ dimensions of our daily living. Produce a short film investigating the boundaries and parameters of ‘use’ and ‘use-less’. The film, as a ‘re- framing’, should question our ways of practicing ‘use’ and ‘useless’, using specific/detail conditions, moments and nuances within our daily practice/environment.

Examine the inter-relationships of material/ immaterial, human/non-human, and functional/phenomenal dimensions of a specific site on campus. Implement a project that relates with the conditions/dynamics of the site and is relevant to the site’s operational/living conditions (functional/phenomenal) through its corporeal presence.

Identify and observe latent/hidden potentialities within everyday environments and practices. Study a specific ‘hidden’ aspect using probes that respond to the properties of the ‘hidden’. Devise an apparatus that reveals the ‘hidden’.

Explore the idea of ‘boundaries and edges’ in the context of the individual studio space.  Speculates possible boundary condition(s) of the space. Conceive and construct a boundary condition around the studio space, discussing the delineation of ‘my space’ and its (physical, perceptual, temporal) negotiations with ‘others’ spaces’.

Explore the body (and it parts) through a series of physical augmentations/mutations. Examine) the existing condition of the body (spatial, formal, textual, functional) Construct a series of physical augmentations/mutations  onto the body probing its conditions and potentials.

Discuss and investigate particular presences/absences of our body (bodies) in space, then construct an apparatus that traces, draws, and (re)constructs the phenomena.