Armand E. Gamboa
A Circuit of Discrete Qualities
From first-year graduate studio Stairs, Stands, And Ziggurats.
Faculty: Sarah Blankenbaker
About the studio:
Conceived as a thought experiment for taking post-Fordist consumer culture to its logical conclusion, No-Stop City exists as a set of architectural plans and perspectives for a hypothetical city created by Andrea Branzi of Archizoom. No-Stop City is endless and totalizing. Everywhere is interior, and there is no way out. Fast-forward three decades and this imagined condition had become reality. Airports, casinos, shopping centers—all contemporary forms of architecture produce what Rem Koolhaas in 2002 termed “junkspace.”The project for the semester speculated on a hypothetical building type—a closed but paradoxically exterior building—to counter Branzi’s open but interior scheme. It relied on three basic tenets: closed plan, exteriority, and elevation.
About the project:
In response to the endlessly expansive and undifferentiated qualities of the open and interior “nostop-city”, this project is composed of bounded “parts-to-a-whole” whose open air and processional nature suggests a closed and exterior alternative to those qualities explored by Archizoom. 2. The paradox of the “no-stop-city” lies within its pairing of open and interior (the collision of the containing planes of the floor and ceiling with an ever expanding growth toward the horizon). Which is to say it produces a homogeneous experience that is replicated to infinity, a single point of reference which is shared by everyone at every moment. 3. The production of this pairing suggests a different reality wherein the paradox produced (the closed and exterior) is instead a connected series of heterogeneous experiences dependent upon (rather than indifferent to) one’s position within a Circuit of Discrete Qualities. 4. These qualities of difference (moments of connection, diversion, anarchy, and scale) are all products of similar parts deconstructed from a normative whole, then reassembled into a novel one.
Winner of the 2022 Alumni Choice Award for a Continuing Student