Four Takes on an Architecture
2015

Three Alternate Proposals  to
a Speculative Office Tower
Brooklyn, New York

“Four Takes on an Architecture” is the design supplement to my master’s thesis “New Capitalist Architecture,” which was conceptualized, researched and written over the course of a year. Believing that architecture’s disciplinary, pedagogical, and practical reaction to global finance capitalism has ultimately been inadequate, the thesis undertakes the search for a mode of architectural design and production that is compatible with its status in our age of capitalism. Taking the system tout court, the thesis asks in the broadest sense what it could mean to start with capitalism (in both its global and local iterations) as the lens through which to begin architecting. The trajectory of the thesis begins by breaking down and describing the factors that come together to produce architecture: economic, government regulation, labor, and material. It takes a pragmatic turn when a deeper understanding of the factors of architectural production allows each factor - many constituent parts of which are often thought to be external to architecture - to become instrumentalized by the designer in the production process. In practical terms, this means the designer enters the process before the brief, effectively designing the financial and legal structures and material and labor systems employed in, and that become the built artifact, the result of which produces new, albeit sometimes subtle, architectures. New capitalist architecture, it is posited by the thesis, is the architectural production created through the instrumentalization of the factors of production for the deliberate purpose of achieving an architectural artifact located along a spectrum whose systematic effect on one end is relatively decelerated development and on the other is highly accelerated development. Ambivalent as a framework with respect to political, ethical, or economic aspirations, it nonetheless recognizes the potential for achieving such ends, and leaves those decisions up to the designer. This is ultimately offered as a defense of architecture, whereby architecture operates on capitalism, rather than the other way around. “Four Takes on an Architecture” was the venue to test through a design methodology ideas from the written thesis. Using the planned development of an already designed 100,000 square foot speculative office building in Williamsburg, Brooklyn as the design prompt (“Take 1,” not shown here), the brief calls for three relatively realistic alternative proposals, each of which produces a different systemic effect. The site is an assemblage of parcels that occupies half of the block bordered by North 10th and North 11th Streets and Wythe Avenue, which is currently occupied by single and two story industrial buildings that are slated for demolition. Each of the three proposals is a specific architectural solution derived from strategies designed around each of the four factors of production. The result is three buildings, unique in their conception and production (material, labor, program, financial and legal structures). Finally, the representation for each project is done in a manner consistent with where each proposed project falls along a spectrum of capitalist development. We see this occur principally vis-a-vis the technique of image construction, the framing of each image, as well as its content.