This prototype is a chunk of the Cafe of the The Main Museum. It shows how loose, and even broken relations between building mass, surface articulation, and construction joints can create mysterious, vexing architectural effects. Tattoos, metaseams, and supercomponents replace grids, meshes, and parametric ordering systems, creating strange mass-readings and scale-indeterminacy.
Architecture is thereby released from its death-match with tectonic expression in the form of panels and other little pieces of material that have so often been employed ”to give architecture a human scale”, as if that were architecture’s inherent duty. The idea of tectonic fictions draws on atectonic theory, where truth and authenticity of construction are replaced with an ambiguous mixture of graphic and constructive realms.
The prototype negotiates between the everyday real of the Los Angeles Department of Building and Safety and its requirements, and a projective architectural state. By design, it includes both familiar constructive elements as well as weird ones.
Location: Los Angeles, California
Curators: Hernan Diaz Alonso and David Ruy
Exhibitors: Thom Mayne, Neil Denari, Ferda Kolatan, Elena Manferdini, Lucy McRae, P-A-T-T-E-R-N-S, Gehry Partners, UN Studio, etc.
