Cheap is More
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li-jingwah-march-arch-2026-thesis.pdf
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352.84 MB
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Author(s)
Li, Zhenghua 李正华
Advisor(s)
Kolb, Jaffer
Date Issued
February 2026
Publisher
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Abstract
Cheap is More. This appears to be an architect’s wordplay on “What is more?” Yet it ultimately points to a simple and fundamental principle: Cheap=More, More=Cheap. If there is anything that “is more”, it is cheapness itself. Cheapness means:
1. Addressing the majority—the basic, the foundational, the common;
2. Redistributing privilege downward, releasing them into broader domains;
3. Elevating rights, allowing common knowledge to enter higher realms.
Cheapness operates as an exchange channel between privilege (the peak) and rights (the ground), sustaining the liquidity between these two spaces. In this sense, cheapness becomes a practical instrument for equity. In a world driven primarily by capital and labor, cheapness functions simultaneously as vehicle, key, and doorway.
Cheapness embodies a peculiar duality. On the one hand, it disregards difference—uniqueness, rarity, and irreproducibility. On the other, it flattens differences—class, geography,age, and language. This thesis seeks to transform the destructive potential of cheapness into creative capacity: using the simple, the immediate, and the readily available to intensify the specificity of here, now, and you. By treating price as a tool for exchanging materials, labor, space, and other architectural elements, the thesis investigates how cheap construction
reshapes individual spatial agency.
Cheapness, however, should not have a key method or material. It must remain a flexible, adaptive, and contingent open relation. Accordingly, this thesis constitutes a three-and-a-half-year, multidimensional exploration that tackles every factor embedded in price: prefabrication, modularity, flexible construction, recycled materials, shanzhai practices, universal joints, and ready-mades, forming the body of the thesis. In the final semester, the system is distilled into universally transmissible principles—tension, compression, and function—which collectively generate an open cheap system unconstrained by material, form, quantity, or price: LPS (Line, Pipe, Surface). LPS foregrounds the core of cheapness as casual, ubiquitous, and intuitive.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Architecture
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