THE SATISFACTION OF ARCHITECTURE
This short film chronicles the destruction of 1/2” = 1’0” scaled, wood-framed architecture models. Over 100 first-year architecture students from the University of Illinois at Chicago were assigned to frame and construct a Sears, Roebuck and Co. kit home from the 1936 Modern Homes catalog using basswood sticks. Borrowing from Ed Ruscha’s 1956 Royal Road Test, a picture-book story of a Royal Manual X typewriter being thrown out of the window of a 1963 Buick traveling down the highway, we tasked the students to intentionally destroy their models, in order to construct a design problem upon the models. To do so, we dropped them, threw them, and bounced basketballs at them.
The studio, titled The Satisfaction of Architecture, pedagogically concerned itself with contemporary obligations associated with renovation, reuse, and architectural alteration. By using the Sears Modern Home as the base primitive, the students learned basic concepts of framing before forcibly damaging their previous work in order to move forward with a new design problem. Working in this way, the intended process, documented in video, aims to make light of the inevitability (that student models will deteriorate), promotes the surrender to the preciousness of their own work, and asks students to confront and accept the fate of failure and destruction, while posing a relevant and practical design problem; the revision and the adaptation.
Spring 2025. With Alaina Griffin, Andrew Jennings, Ethan O’Kane, Paul Preissner, Juan Suarez and Julia Turner.