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ARCH 402 Advanced Topics in Architecture II
Watkin Degree Project, Spring 2020, Rice Architecture
Instructor: Amelyn Ng
Data’s Base is an architectural/infrastructural investigation of various off-site forms of storage, and their attendant medial, material, sociopolitical and ecological dimensions. How does something so banal as “storage” organize information, the city, and contemporary life? Who gets access, and who doesn’t? What typologies and programmatic frictions are implicated, and what falls in the gap between designed institutions and their hidden, undesigned counterparts? Instead of entering through the front door of classic institutions such as the Library or Archive, we’ve attempted to rethink contemporary publics from the city’s back-of-house.
Students have expanded the definition of data / information / storage for themselves, looking critically (and beyond “the digital”) into the storage of data, plants, dead bodies, solar energy, national mail, high art, incarceration systems, community wi-fi, shipping port work, museum specimens... Each thesis asks what it means to “turn a normative storage condition inside out”. We traveled to New York City in February, 2020, where all eleven student projects are located. With diverse interventions at multiple scales, projects seek to open up new spaces of appearance and collectivity, and to redesign conditions for connection and agency in an increasingly default, closed world.
The Data’s Base senior studio draws from independent research on media’s “other spaces,” produced in Information Richness, a Fall 2019 seminar at Rice School of Architecture.
Watkin Degree Project, Spring 2020, Rice Architecture
Instructor: Amelyn Ng
Data’s Base is an architectural/infrastructural investigation of various off-site forms of storage, and their attendant medial, material, sociopolitical and ecological dimensions. How does something so banal as “storage” organize information, the city, and contemporary life? Who gets access, and who doesn’t? What typologies and programmatic frictions are implicated, and what falls in the gap between designed institutions and their hidden, undesigned counterparts? Instead of entering through the front door of classic institutions such as the Library or Archive, we’ve attempted to rethink contemporary publics from the city’s back-of-house.
Students have expanded the definition of data / information / storage for themselves, looking critically (and beyond “the digital”) into the storage of data, plants, dead bodies, solar energy, national mail, high art, incarceration systems, community wi-fi, shipping port work, museum specimens... Each thesis asks what it means to “turn a normative storage condition inside out”. We traveled to New York City in February, 2020, where all eleven student projects are located. With diverse interventions at multiple scales, projects seek to open up new spaces of appearance and collectivity, and to redesign conditions for connection and agency in an increasingly default, closed world.
The Data’s Base senior studio draws from independent research on media’s “other spaces,” produced in Information Richness, a Fall 2019 seminar at Rice School of Architecture.