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CATALINA LEE GRADUATE THESIS 2022

sci-arc graduate thesis 2022

06 Light + Materiality 08 Scenes 12 PLAY 16 Procession of Spaces 20 Status, Storage, Display 24 A Flash 26 super_01 28 super_02 32 Domestic Cues

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Supercharged explores the typologies and tropes of the typical suburban home. The knowledge rooted in material culture and its environmental effects become a lens to re-examine the suburban home. Looking to the sprawling suburban landscape, documenting patterns within the various frameworks of suburbia emerge to gain a broader understanding of the home.

Studies of the home is inaugurated from documentation of postwar suburban homes and its domestic elements from then, to Modernism, to now.

Light and materiality become the subject to render a space different of that itself including aspects of the minutia of quotidian life and abstraction of space. Atypical materials are treated and applied to the home as a means of re-examining a typology antithetical to the typical surburban home in efforts to make meaningful studies culminating in a hybridization of the Home.

Graduate Thesis 2022

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Carina Store, SANAA

Teatro Municiapl, Miguel Fisac

Hotel Tres Islas, Miguel Fisac

Pascual de Juan House, Miguel Fisac

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Light + Materiality

Ruth Asawa sculptures

Dior Store, SANAA

Maujeer Gallery, SO-IL

Festival, Tadao Ando

Dior Store, SANAA

Zollverein Design School, SANAA

Amant Art Campus, SO-IL

Kukje Gallery, SO-IL

Graduate Thesis 2022 7

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Compositions, scenes, frames, scale, proportion

Gifu Apartments, SANAA

Graduate Thesis 2022 9

Desplans, Specific Generic

Acne Studios Tokyo, Specific Generic

Acne Studios LA, Specific Generic

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Diamond Are Forever, 1971

A Single Man, 2009

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PLAY To play fosters our curiousity and engagment with the environment. Through installations, we begin to engage with the idea of play and our senses manipulation of space and material, malleability of fabric, windows, transparency. Engagement and stimulation from our surroundings encourage us to become conscious of ourselves and our bodies within the environment.

Louis Vuitton Installation, PLAYLAB

Graduate Thesis 2022 13

Maison Bordeaux, OMA? Petra Blaisse

Re-set, Petra Blaisse

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Rabobank Sittard Auditorium Curtains, Petra Blaisse

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Procession of Spaces Through order of experience and space, inauguration of a space is informed by adjacent space(s) affecting our experience. How one interacts and exists within a space is explored through multipilicity and ambiguity of space realized through materiality, various geometries and fragments of textures begin to demarcate or interrupt how one might perceive and navigate space. Barcelona Pavilion exemplifies different fragmented perspectives and perception of existence vs. a view of a space.

Graduate Thesis 2022

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Villa Muller, Adolf Loos

Barcelona Pavilion study model

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interruption of reading through materiality or embedded grid

multiplicity / ambiguity of photos on glass wall

Space Odyssey, Stanley Kubrick

Geometry of Light, Luftwerk + Iker Gil

Flagellation of Christ, Piero della Francesca

Playtime, Jacques Tati

Acne Studios Paris, Specific Generic

Graduate Thesis 2022 19

ambiguity through transparency

background / foreground illusion framing a space

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Status, Storage and Display Beginning to understand interruption of spaces through surfaces, materiality, geometry within domesticity Implications / construction of these application of colors / textures

Graduate Thesis 2022

"Storage also became characterized and built as a carefully calculated matter that balanced what had to be concealed with what best served the family through being revealed."

Dianne Harris. Little White Houses: How The Postwar Home Constructed Race In America. 187.

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"Surfaces such as countertops, applicance casings, floor coverings, wall treatments, and furniture finishes assume particular importance as tools for domestic differentiation when the forms or spaces of the house itself remain conservative or conventional, as they so often did in postwar houses. Newer, smoother, cleaner, and brighter surfaces became important, not just for the imagined hygenic benefits they offered but also because they were part of an aesthetic emphasis on surface apperances, on the way things look, and on the 'skin' of all things as a determining factor in status and in identification."

Dianne Harris. Little White Houses: How The Postwar Home Constructed Race In America. 192.

Graduate Thesis 2022

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A Flash Examining the various applications and treatment of surfaces, materials with reflective qualities became a point of interest. At a glance, reflective materials evidently provide alluring and immediate imagery and effects. It becomes a medium of reflective illusion, functioning as an architectural apparatus without the medium of a building.

As seen with Andy Warhol's Silver Factory, the space becomes animated, making the ambience itself "a machine for producing endless, shifting images" (Lavin, 127).

Graduate Thesis 2022

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"Today, as repression and prohibition are becoming as rampant in culture at large as they have long been in architecture, it is more important than ever to insist that even something as apparently stolid as a familiar building can become new and better when seduced into changing its colours."

Paul Rudolph NYC Apartment

Silver Clouds, Andy Warhol

Sylvia Lavin. Flash In the Pan. 136.

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super_01 A physical model begins to explore light, materiality and its effects through limited materials: various meshes, a reflective corrugated paper, and colored film. A seemingly endless, manifold of effects and conditions established ephermeral ambiguity of space. Light source demonstrated to be instrumental in producing specific, intentional effects.

Graduate Thesis 2022

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super_02 A continuation of the physical model, super_02 explores the conditions within domesticity. Typical elements like a window, a hallway, and a plant enter the scene as a scale reference.

Graduate Thesis 2022

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Graduate Thesis 2022

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Domestic Cues

Lifestyle and styling analyses boards from the "Learning From Levittown" studio

Through engagement with a series of texts, a pertinent realm of an architecture that grants its users autonomy is the medium of interiors. The cues or symbols we decipher from our objects and layers of our environment govern our lifestyle - these symbols exemplify ourselves and desires, showcasing an idea about our person. The house, as a main vessel, is a financial and emotional investment, and the objects and memories that are displayed or remembered within the space become the foundation in our lives.

Graduate Thesis 2022

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Graduate Thesis 2022

" [On decorative accessories] ...These include glassware, ceramic objects such as ashtrays and candy dishes, and two-dimensional art to be hung on the walls.

These objects legislate social behaviors and, as such, can be interpreted as another example of Modernist control of the body. Moreover, they were especially invested with the power to give "personality" to a room and should be understood as symbols that are consciously displayed to project a homeowner's identity."

Kristina Wilson. Mid-Century Modernism and the American Body. 19.

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