The Ur Project

Architecture

Ancient Mesopotamian typologies, in particular the urban and domestic plans of Ur (ca. 2000 BCE), serve here as the material basis upon which have been applied a few rudimentary operations (tracing, extruding, rotating, intersecting, extracting) designed to coax from and activate in them their inherent possibilities and implicit forms. These operations yield a complex geometry interminably releasing unanticipated forms that suggest objects and architecture.

In the ideal geometries of Classical design and the efficient and functional ones of Modern design, there is at bottom an enchantment with ideas. Designing is the willful imposition of preconceived ideas on what would otherwise be passive and chaotic matter. It seeks to make legible and maintain its ideas despite the dense material aura in which they are inevitably caught.

Critical of this, my work maps a shift in the general regimes of designing away from their Classical eidetic and Modern functional appropriation toward their resolution in the morphological play of continuous variation. Resisting the sovereign, static, transcendental geometries of Classical and Modern design, my work concocts supple, dynamic, material processes of interminable production. It is the consequence of surrendering to material conditions that throw off their own forms suggesting design.