Maxwell Rosner

Innie/Outie

2016

Oswego, NY

Advisor: Maya Alam

Architects use typological classifications to contextualize, diagram, iconize, and ultimately flatten ideas about space so as to render them intellectually accessible to their audiences as social constructs. This system of classification often deploys representations of figure as the signifier of type. Some of us, however, resist the exercise of typologization in favor of the pursuit of total spatial autonomy -- a critical preoccupation with that which is, rather than that which appears to be. This methodology privileges structural organization over figural expression. Innie/Outie suggests that while both of these methods qualify as valid architectural projects projects, neither may supplant the other, lest we forfeit our claim as practicioners of a socially progressive and accessible discipline.

Innie/Outie presents a series of representational translations of a highly familiar and utilitarian piece of infrastructure: the high voltage transmission tower. While Architects from the advent of modernism onward have privileged the narrative of infrastructure as framework, this thesis prioritizes the latent serial objecthood of the transmission tower. In the process of flattening an infrastructural proposition to a representation of figure, and in the subsequent projection of the figure into three dimensions, Innie/Outie situates the architect both as translator and interpreter, and exploits the process of translation as an opportunity to synthesize new readings of figure with character, structure with posture, and infrastructure with landscape.