cincinnati OHIO

University of Cincinnati, School of Architecture and Interior Design
critic: Mara MARCU.

suckerPUNCH: Describe your project.

Mara MARCU: “Building from Within/ Building from Without” offers, as resolution to the inside/ outside dichotomy, a third condi­tion: the state of being hidden.

The latent disclosure of what connects the unapologetically transparent to the purely opaque demands spatial secrecy and utmost discretion. The Secret Room silently guides the pilgrim through what would be an otherwise indecipherable, impossible and impenetra­ble labyrinthine construct.

Design problems are taught by means of anomalies while employing spatial grammar—bend; skew; ex­pand; extrude; merge; yield; twist; interlock; lift; carve; frac­ture; shear; embed; puncture—in order to build the narrative. Sampling becomes the tool used to negotiate between unique site conditions and their implicit constraints. Close attention is being paid to apertures with their implied, yet absent, volumes, which become part of the fluid circulatory device. While isolating specific variables in the design process, questions are approached with myriad external information at the detriment of having no internal knowledge. Consequently the lens of discovery shifts from visible analogies and opens up possibilities of endless spatial permutations.

sP: What or who influenced this project?
MM: Filip Dujardain; Oliver Ratsi; Giovanni Batista Piranesi; M. C. Escher; Archigram; and Lebbeus Woods.

sP: What were you reading/listening to/watching while developing this project?
MM: Reading: Patrik Schumacher, The Autopoiesis of Architecture; Antoine Picon, Digital Culture in Architecture. Listening to: Zola Jesus; Lykke Li; Dead Can Dance; and Johann Sebastian Bach. Watching: Baraka.

sP: Whose work is currently on your radar?
MM: Zaha Hadid, Kengo Kuma, and Achim Menges.

Additional credits and links:
[maramarcu.com]

students: Chen LUDAN, Gianni JACOB, & Joe TUEGEL.