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Rigorous Ambiguity

Andrew Hunt
Rigorous Ambiguity

From third-year graduate research studio I Haven't Looked at Clouds That Way.
Faculty: Andrew Zago

About the studio:

In virtually the entire history of architecture, across centuries and cultures, buildings have conformed, more or less, to the logic of construction systems and the pull of gravity resulting in buildings with square corners, vertical walls, and flat floors built of relatively stable and durable materials. These traits have been abstracted into general theories of architecture in which a quasi-moralistic value has been ascribed to clear tectonic expression and material authenticity. The last third of the twentieth century saw architecture that defied these ambitions and overturned these theories. Today there is, within architecture, a sophisticated but reactionary return to the previous ambitions of formal rectitude. This research seminar and studio recognizes and shares the anxious desire for that return but rejects the disciplinary amnesia it entails. In the return, the work incorporates the unreasonable features of doubt in the search for a new ur-form condition.

About the project:

This project proposes an alternative to the new building for the permanent collection at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. The project combines a formal ambition to become a cube through difficult technique and a material strategy to obscure its physicality. The resulting museum organizes the collection in spiraling galleries around a courtyard and a basement housing a small theater and museum back of house operations.

Winner of the 2022 Faculty Fellowship Award for outstanding third-year graduate project and Pella Fellowship Prize for best graduate project