Surveillance methods and technologies have become increasingly ambiguous in their integration into daily life, they mediate how individuals are imaged, monitored and processed into documented data shadows. Such imaging systems have altered the ways in which we navigate our physical and digital environments, particularly in the domestic setting.
By developing architectural operations of countermeasure, the spatial image or capturability of the home can be actively resilient by negotiating its relationship with the ubiquitous digital surveillance state. Architecture as a mode of instrumentation can operate as a medium to reposition ideas of visibility and privacy through optical manipulation and obfuscation techniques, enabling new ideas of challenging agency in surveillance.
The project reconsiders the domestic suburban landscape as a testbed for architectural resistance, where concepts of privacy not only independently aim to conceal but also actively control their mediated imagability. In manipulating the suburban residential module, the homes are transformed into sites of ambiguity, questioning the interactions between built space and methods of surveillance.
TITLEVANISHING ACTS + (SIX) TIME 2025 - GRAD PLACE PROJECTBOSTON, MASSACHUSETTSM.Arch THESIS
The Google Street Vehicle takes route down the neighborhood road, scanning with a point array projection, measuring each accessible facing surface. Its signals develop symmetrical data doubles of the neighborhood, a continuous capturing of amorphic renderings imaging each house in sequence. A resident decides to take architectural action against the scanning of private plots. An attempt to dissect and diverge from a corporate vision. A House, now unmeasured, captured in lower resolution, low fidelity, and less clarity. A spatial jamming is composed, creating saturations of grain and noise in between the Mailbox and the front door.
The Optometrist's camera system is activated as she leaves the house at her normal hour. Her extensive collection of optical medical instruments are subject to prying eyes. She monitors for indication of irregularity in the dimensioned displays of her camera frames. She formulates instrumentation of her own that operates to blur the contents of the residency. As the optometry house increasingly blurs and distorts its form from the exterior, it simultaneously magnifies its visibility from the internal out. A data-serviced paranoia.
Manic by visions of patterns, polka dots, stripes, shapes, and symbols, the tattooist looks for any skin, shell, or flesh to illustrate on. She expands her work beyond the surface of the body to the spatial area of her inhabitable environment. The tattooist fixes another patterned panel to the exterior of her residence, almost instantly infused into the visual language of the elevation. Her image's silhouette becomes consumed in the surrounding graphics. A pattern mapping obscuring surfaces from body to building, from building to environment, and environment to body.
Assembling and curating his mechanical sculptures, the sculptor collects fragments of scrap for his work. He “borrows” the disregarded and unattended objects of the suburban landscape to repurpose as sculptural absurdities. His process, the obtaining of various components, operating on them till unrecognizable to its former owner, then applied and assembled into a collection of mechanical bull-like anomalies. Much like the objects, the house recontours its silhouettes, contours, and profiles.
In a reflective and refractive volume, the barber cleans his clippers and razors from his recent client. The property paneled in bifolding mirrors, reflecting the operations of his neighbors across the house. He cuts, trims and fragments the surrounding environment into geometric reflections, as his house reshapes its edges. The residence and shop become situated between splinters of black painted trimmings and reflective edges.
As the sun is setting, house lights illuminate windows like a collection of neighborhood television displays, casting episodes of interior projections. A figure makes her way to her first position. The Dancer resights her performance in her addition, unknowingly inviting a curious neighborly gaze. Her figure remapped in motion through the architectural frames like strobe lights and animatronics. Her rehearsal becomes optically untraceable, Imaged only in the footsteps of the house. Performances refold as layers between assemblies contradicting each other alluding to the dismissal of her choreography. The episodes become filtered and hazy, as the performance becomes unperceivable in effects.
The house in the digital era has evolved beyond its basic function as private shelter, becoming a dynamic tool that facilitates daily life. Today, the house is an interface, a device, an image, and a virtual marker, autonomously staged and constantly changing as it digitally interacts with spaces beyond its property lines. A house is now as connected to systems of imaging, capturing, and mediating information as we are. Its value as a private space takes on different meanings in relation to transparency. The picture window beside the sofa and television is no longer the most exposing component of a neighborhood. The uniformity of suburban housing, exhibiting a resemblance to one another, sets the narrative and serves as an architectural testing ground for the project. Each house, while similar to the others and somewhat familiar to most, provides a consistent model for exploring architectural countermeasures. In an environment where privacy is increasingly blurred between home and neighborhood, transparency shifts with the integration of everyday surveillance practices. The narrative (SIX) begins to elucidate the complexities of a 24-hour cycle, illustrating how the interplay between public visibility and personal privacy unfolds within this intertwined digital and physical landscape. The project introduces (SIX) individuals whose residential additions reflect an operation of counter-surveillance in the digital era as well as their character persona. The architecture becomes both an instrument of operational camouflaging and counter design as well as an architectural metaphor of the occupant it serves to mask. Arranged together along the street, the house's systems of counter surveillance examine the interconnected relation between neighbors as speculative systems of exchanged imaging. Whether internal or external, each persona’s approach to levels of obscuration is rooted in a surface level understanding of their occupation. Each house reflective of a countermeasure credited on a character value explores how its related attributes could formulate an embedded language of counter surveillance. The text and language that illustrates the condition have become the designing driver of the project, narration as form finding, or written segmentation as exploration. As the project operates within the written narration of the unfolding events within suburbia, its articulation as physical explorations in architecture becomes furthermore mediated through practices of representation. Processes in installation, exhibition, and projection become key formats of representation to explore legibility in the written design of the project. Foundations in orthographic language are expanded into methods of digital mediation that toggle the project process between physical and computation design allowing the written narration (SIX) to formulate architectural happenings. The project finds itself investigating methods of medium and representation as much as it is involved in formulating mass, volume, and shape as architecture. The thesis is not only interested in a paper architecture, but rather a written, projected, or performative one. A fixation on imaging through multiple formats of medium or media becomes the interactive investigation within the architectural articulation of the suburban site, determining the formative values of the presented architectural components.
