FIELD WORK
FRAGMENTS OF MEMORY AND MORALITY; A SCHOOLSEAN LE
Ordinary (n): Everyday architectural forms and infrastructures that appear neutral, utilitarian, or unremarkable—but which quietly encode systems of morality, power, and social values.
Fieldwork (n): The act of witnessing and reflecting on the moral and aesthetic weight of the ordinary landscape.
Dichotomy of the ‘ordinary’ life
Fieldwork reimagines a decommissioned oil field in Los Angeles as a landscape of passive and active learning, where fragments of everyday architecture—homes, gas stations, office buildings—are quietly dismantled and reassembled. These familiar forms, like the oil infrastructure once buried beneath them, are constructed to serve comfort and ambition, yet obscure the crude forces that sustain them. By subtly distorting their geometry and placement, the project destabilizes the idea that ordinary architecture is innocent—revealing its deep entanglement with extraction, labor, and belief. Memory lingers not as nostalgia but as unease, as students of a campus designed from symbolism learn to read the built environment not as neutral, but as morally charged—creating a setting where students confront how ordinary structures shape not just how we live, but how we think.
chapter 01: Field
chapter 02: Fragments
chapter 03: Framework - Pedagogy
chapter 04: Final Coordinates
