Fulfilled Architecture, Excess, and Desire

Ashley Bigham

Based on the eponymous symposium and exhibition, Fulfilled: Architecture, Excess, and Desire considers the role of architecture in a culture shaped by the excessive manufacturing and assuagement of desire. Until the term became synonymous with Amazon warehouses, the concept of fulfillment described the achievement of a desire—sometimes tangible, often psychological or spiritual. With the rapid growth of e-commerce, our understanding of fulfillment has evolved to reflect a seemingly endless cycle of desire and gratification—one whose continuity hinges on our willingness to overlook the cultural, economic, and environmental impacts of our ever-increasing expectation of quick and efficient fulfillment. A closer look at fulfillment reveals a social, typological, formal, aesthetic, and economic practice constructed collectively through both digital and physical interactions. It is a cultural practice which evolves like a language, both universally transferable and contextually specific. As a symposium, exhibition, and now publication, this project aims to draw out these new arrangements, sticky relationships, and material byproducts of cultural production and to ask again the age-old question, “What does it mean to be fulfilled?”

This book examines the architecture of fulfillment through three lenses: logistical, material, and cultural fulfillment. Each reveals the new forms of architectural practice and research that are possible, typical, and even surreptitiously encouraged in the age of Amazon.

Title: Fulfilled

Size: 7” x 9” Portrait

Pages: 144pp

Binding: Softbound

Publication Date: Fall 2022

ISBN: 978-1-951541-64-4

Price: $25.00

World Rights: Available

Fulfillment networks are not invisible systems; they are tangible objects—warehouses, suburban houses, parking lots, cardboard boxes, shopping malls, mechanical systems, shipping containers— with which architects necessarily interact. From political mapping and questions of labor to digital and physical storage typologies, contemporary architects learn from and work critically within the architecture of fulfillment. Their interests and approaches include the material and environmental shortcomings of global logistics and the formal, representational, and cultural potentials of a culture of excess. This book highlights architecture’s unique capacity to offer methodologies for confronting an increasingly ambiguous, alienating world and produce new knowledge and unexpected solutions that go beyond the dichotomies of rural and urban territories.

Author

Ashley Bigham is an assistant professor of architecture at the Knowlton School of Architecture and co-director of Outpost Office. She is a former Walter B. Sanders Fellow at the University of Michigan’s Taubman College, a MacDowell Fellow, and a Fulbright Research Fellow in Lviv, Ukraine.

Ana Miljački – Boston, MA

Ang Li – Boston, MA

Ashley Bigham – Columbus, OH

Cristina Goberna Pesudo – Madrid, Spain

Curtis Roth – Columbus, OH

Jesse LeCavalier – Toronto, Canada

John McMorrough – Ann Arbor, MI

Keith Krumwiede – San Francisco, CA

Laida Aguirre – Ann Arbor, MI

Leigha Dennis – New York, NY

Lluís Alexandre Casanovas Blanco – Barcelona, Spain

Michelle Chang – Boston, MA

Miles Gertler – Toronto, Canada

Mira Henry & Matthew Au (Current Interests) – Los Angeles, CA

ISBN 978-1-951541-64-4

52500

Way Beyond Bigness

The Need for a Watershed Architecture

Derek Hoeferlin

Way Beyond Bigness is a design-research project that studies the Mekong, Mississippi and Rhine river basins, with particular focus on multi-scaled, water-based infrastructural transformation. The book proposes a simple, adaptive framework that utilizes a three-part, integrative design-research methodology, structured as: Appreciate + Analyze, Speculate + Synthesize, and Collaborate + Catalyze. To do such, Way Beyond Bigness realigns watersheds and architecture across multiple: scales (site to river basin), disciplines (ecologists to economists), narratives (hyperbolic to pragmatic), and venues (academic to professional). The research critiques and recasts Oxford Dictionary’s two very different definitions for a “watershed”: 1) “An area or ridge of land that separates waters flowing to different rivers, basins, or seas” and 2) “An event or period marking a turning point in a situation in a course of action or state of affairs” and its two very different definitions for “architecture”: 1) “The art or practice of designing and constructing buildings” and 2) “the complex or carefully designed structure of something.” The book highlights the author’s comprehensive work of over more than a decade, including in depth field research across the Mekong, Mississippi and Rhine, along with a diverse body of academic and professional collaborations, ranging from the speculative to the community-based.

Author

Derek Hoeferlin, AIA is principal of [dhd] derek hoeferlin design, an award-winning, trans-scalar architecture and design practice based in St. Louis. He is an associate professor at Washington University in St. Louis, where he teaches undergraduate and graduate level multi-disciplinary approaches to architecture.

ISBN 978-1-940743-59-2

Title: Way Beyond Bigness

Size: 6” x 9” Portrait

Pages: 250pp

Binding: Softbound

Publication Date: Fall 2022

ISBN: 978-1-940743-59-2

Price: $34.95

World Rights: Available

53495