The Turtle : an American school of architecture : a radical mediocracy

Abstract

This thesis evolves as a curatorial exercise with three phases: revisiting the practical and aesthetic position of the architecture thesis, structuring a design environment within MIT for fellow thesis candidates, leading to the development of a 1:1 test case - the Turtle. The Turtle will transport past student theses while also serving as a remote "pin-up" review space. The unit travels through and out of campus, in order to place greater publicity on the output of MIT both within and beyond the Institute. This provides theses candidates with a prop for their respective presentations allowing for more informed contributions to the MIT School of Architecture. The Turtle ultimately aims to serve as cultural equipment towards informing a broader sphere of knowledge that becomes more accessible to the contemporary architecture student, their critics/consultants, and their respective audiences. Considering MIT's digital thesis search engine, D-Space, these additional terms are addressed: a new type of specialist, authorship, collaboration, collective imagination, communication, digital, Venturi's duck, education, endless, fact, faction, fear, fiction, Gehry's fish, hegemony, human, infinite, interference, knowledge, lack of knowledge, learning, material, mode of production, movement, myth, need, open source, optimism, party, political imagination as risk society, practice, propaganda, property, public programs, Goulthorpe's rabbit, relations, research, reticulation, rhinoceros, scale, simulation, spiritual, student tools, students as medium, teaching, technological, truth, turtle, variation.