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) EXHIBITION TIME 2025 - GRAD PLACE PROJECTBOSTON, MASSACHUSETTSTHESIS EXHIBITION
Architectural representation and presentation formatted in installations and exhibitions have evolved the way we engage with specific topics. Transforming beyond traditional methods of representation, the contemporary use of exhibitions and installations are both integrated into the design process and expanded contextual mediation explorations. In the era where hyper-mediated experiences and overlapping technological representations, architectural topics can be further explored in spatial conversations while using the exhibition as a medium of representation. Traditions in drawings, models, renders, and imaging become curated in ways that further scale a design attitude within the project and the space it occupies as presentation. These traditional formats of representation remain essential in communicating architectural legibility, however by challenging the way they engage within a spatial organization or design it becomes itself a larger composition. These multiscale or multilevel approaches to methods of representation allow designers to explore the temporary, multi-mediated, atmospheric, or even performative aspects previously uncapturable. In exhibiting through interactive installations such as live audio integration or projection media the architectural content can be experimental in the ways it is read, experienced, or engaged. By leveraging multiple forms of mediated content in a spatial staging the work transforms the process of presentation into an act of liveliness, which produces new articulations in concept, method, and even function. New relationships between the viewer, space, and idea are formed in a process of overlapping content. This expanded field of architectural exhibition resists the fixated nature of conventional representations, offering opportunities for immersive mediated environments. Expanded frameworks of content and concept provoke alternative ways of seeing and thinking within or around the discourse of the project.
The integration of installation and projection into architectural discourse challenges the discipline to rethink its epistemologies. What constitutes a project? Where does the architectural idea reside—in the drawing, the space, the media, the experience? By embracing formats that are temporal, immersive, and participatory, architects can begin to explore ideas not through fixed representations but through performative acts of spatial storytelling. Expanding formats of representation through mediation in exhibition or installation recognises that architecture is not only built from the limitations of conventional mediums. In a moment where the digital integration of imaging and multimediated opportunities are becoming ever more integrated, architectural presentation and representation will adapt and adopt such practoral advancements. Installation and exhibition offer tools for architectural thinking that are fluid, responsive, and critically engaged. They open space for experimentation, discourse, and new forms of project engagement.
