The Ghost in the Machine

Contributors

Yiwei Xue (B.Arch. '22)
Christine Gao (B.Arch. '22)
Claire Oster (B.Arch. '22)
Lucy Ding (B.Arch. '22)
Justin Tan (B.Arch. '22)
Mia DiMaio (B.Arch. '22)
Fernan Bilik (B.Arch. '22)
Gracie Meek (B.Arch. '22)

Class

ARCH 1101 Design I

Instructors

In The Ghost in the Machine, architecture is explored through the organs of perception — the five senses. Studies of animal sensory mechanisms are hybridized with human mechanisms of sight, smell, hearing, touch, and taste to defamiliarize, distort, and amplify our human experience of space through the lens of a specific sense.

In their alteration of our perception of space, sound, light, texture, etc., these prosthetics are designed to leave traces documenting this experience — further defamiliarizing these sensory experiences of space, this time through representation. These drawings become maps, catalogs, or sequences of the sensory experience of the body within a particular space, over time.

While the mechanisms are calibrated to the human body, the representations are at the whim of the sensory inputs — the changing patterns of inhalation in order to smell a specific stimulus or the rotation of the head in response to a certain light condition that amplifies sight.

Yiwei Xue (B.Arch. '22), Sight | Owl: The movement of the eyes while navigating different routes through Milstein Hall.

Christine Gao (B.Arch. '22), Sight | Chameleon: Intensities and direction of sight as range of vision increases but head movement is limited.

Claire Oster (B.Arch. '22), Sight | Tiger: Intensities of motion are documented as a response to focal length.

Lucy Ding (B.Arch. '22), Touch | Manatee: Recalibrating the sense of touch to our most distinctive feeling—pain—along the spine.

Justin Tan (B.Arch. '22), Hearing | Dolphin: Using a mechanism of folds and planes, the human is forced to wade through an altered sense of sight and sound.