INTERIORITY COMPLEX

With cities growing denser and increasingly generic, architecture’s formalist opportunities to create iconic forms are disappearing. Architecture must cross the threshold to engage the re-emergence of interiority, where the inherent friction and complexity provides for a wealth of possibilities.

This thesis shifts formalist maneuvers from external massing to aggressive internal reconfiguration by way of interior massing, which at key moments registers as external conditions. Specifically, the reconfiguration shifts internal logic from an organizing column grid to a structural ceiling taking on mass-like qualities to choreograph spatial volumes.

Architecture operates best as incomplete. Internal reconfiguration affirms architecture’s status as incomplete by navigating through the existing interior-scape of a city. The act of reconfiguring accepts a pre-existing structure and pre-existing program, and all the intrinsic complexity, while striving to incorporate a new architectural / programmatic element. This internal reconfiguration does not attempt to harmoniously resolve the friction between the two opposing programs. On the contrary, the internal reconfiguration exploits the friction by cultivating a threshold where two opposing geometrical conditions—the rough (the market) and the refined (couture boutiques)—appear stitched together, creating instances of simultaneous existence.