falsework : staging construction

Abstract

In a reality at once distant and imminent, the Lost Languages and Other Voices exhibit features stories of stone, tree, and jig. Suspended between a zero-waste utopia where out-of-commission buildings are efficiently stripped for parts, pulverized, and recast into new buildings and a preserved world where the size of climate-controlled wunderkammers get ever larger, these material narratives pull one into perspectives vastly distinct from one's own. At times longer-lived, other times more slowly developed, and oftentimes involving subtle sensibilities, the tales of these matter characters enumerate the point that mass can neither be created nor destroyed, although it may be rearranged in space, or its associations may be changed in form. This thesis proposes falsework as a support structure for architectural transformations that renders un-building a lot more kindred to unfurling than demolishing. Designed as a process governed by both material and notional instructions, falsework selectively subtracts and reconfigures parts of built form to reveal indeterminate spaces that had always been (possible) there, thereby enabling reflective, mournful, or prospective activities. "Staging" refers to both the performance itself and the act of setting the stage for what comes next, prioritizing the procedure of construction over or adjacent to its resulting artifacts. This expanded notion of "construction" challenges the supremacy of architectural objects as well as the obsession with their creation and relative indifference towards their life and ultimate demise. In a world filled with perpetually moving matters, falsework sustains possibilities open, for things to collapse or for an eventual repair.