Adam LaBarge
Baxter Building
From first-year graduate studio Architecture Is Everywhere
Faculty: Sarah Dunn
About the studio:
In the 2015 Chicago Architecture Biennial installation Architecture Is Everywhere, the architect Sou Fujimoto exhibited a series of small plywood squares topped with all manner of ordinary objects—an upside-down ashtray, a loofah, a stack of matchboxes, a pile of potato chips, a mass of ping pong balls—and inhabited them with small scale figures. Seemingly casual but extremely precise, the installation invites us to consider architecture in a new way. If architecture is indeed everywhere, this studio went looking for it, while emphasizing disciplinary precision and control through a series of projects that address issues of scale, proportion, image, and formalism.
About the project:
A library housed with an archive of comics takes on the absurd and graphic nature of its objects. The form is composed of heavy, tectonic parts that slip and slide with one another, reinforced through a weeping and gooey mortar. Here, the library becomes a a device for a sequential juxtaposition of exaggerated parts, emblematic of its archive.
Winner of the 2022 Synectics Group, Inc. Award for an outstanding first-year graduate project