(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2014-04-10)
Pierce, Allen Carl
Blurred LInes seeks to reopen discussion of the scale and interrelation of architecture and furniture, traditionally conceived. It traces the recent history of furniture and architectural making from the high-point of the “built-in” through the manufacturing age, questioning the corresponding stratification of our immediate built environment into building, infill and objects. Engaging modernist and contemporary criticism, it explores a return to unified building in which the architecture might well become the furniture and vice-versa, erasing built hierarchy and asynchronicity. The paper describes lessons learned from modern masters of the discipline from Adolf Loos to Nader Tehrani and attempts to identify key formal, spatial and constructional considerations in the successful integration and “blurring” of this line. All of this comes to bear in the establishment of design experiments to be carried out in studio, testing the possibilities and viability of the paper's theoretical models.