Dysktiria: Alex, the Trypophobiac

Project title: Dysktiria: Alex, the Trypophobiac
Course title: Master of Architecture Thesis
Professor/Instructor: Noah Resnick
Student: Jose Arturo Joglar-Cadilla

Course description: The fundamental goal of an architectural education has not changed in the 2,000 years since this text was written. The culmination of this knowledge and your ability to utilize it in the architectural profession is displayed and evaluated in the Masters Thesis Project. It is the contemporary tool used by the academic institution to demonstrate the student’s ability to enter and contribute to the field of architecture in both theory and practice. The process both mandates and teaches you to identify a theoretical or practical problem, conduct research to formulate an hypothesis to address the problem, and test this hypothesis through a rigorous design intervention. In doing so, a well-executed thesis project not only serves to benefit the student, but also contributes to the discourse of the architectural profession as whole.

Student work description: How can architecture become a tool of awareness at the hand of a disruption within the standardization of the built environment by using a science fiction narrative? Conventional architecture has made people unappreciative of how architecture can shape space, similar to how technology has made us numb to our own being-in-the-world, as Martin Heidegger would say. Architecture in general exists to make people's lives as comfortable as possible and, as a consequence, inhabitants of the built environment no longer pay notice to the architecture that surrounds them. This thesis intends to propose a type of high intensity architecture that has the possibility of provoking a sensation that could make people more sensitive to architectural possibilities. Architecture has gone through the same process with simpler and often boring architectural styles that fit our routines. As Aldous Huxley once said, "Experience is not what happens to a man; it is what man does with what happens to him." And in order to imagine the possibilities and be more conscious of the decisions we make towards the future, we need to free ourselves of conventional limits.