Master of Architecture Thesis Rice University 

iii. misuse + ambiguity



[f20]
Mosque-Cathedral in Cordoba, Spain. A building that was built as a small mosque and continued to grow as the Muslim population kept increasing. Eventually, it was taken over by Christians and converted into a cathedral. The roof distinctly shows the organization of rows of columns from when it was a mosque, and the cathedral’s central nave popping up through. Today, the building functions as museum.
Designed objects inevitably surpass their original intention. They can be “mis”-used while actively serving their original function, put through a process of adaptation to allow for a new use, or be reused in their existing state. Relative to architecture, Aldo Rossi has claimed and argued that the program of a building inevitably changes, releasing the form of architecture as an artifact in the city (13). The inevitable change of use begs the question and desire of multi-functional, flexible design. 












(13) Aldo Rossi and Peter Eisenman, The Architecture of the City.
designing for change in the twentieth century

[f21] 
Fun Palace, 1964,
Cedric Price
Axonometric view of the interior
[f22] 
Fun Palace, 1963
Cedric Price
Interior Perspective Sketch
[f23]
Northwick Hospital, 1962
John Weeks
First Site Plan
[f24]
Northwick Hospital, 1964
John Weeks
Master Site Plan
[f25]
Takara Beautilion, Expo 1970,
Kisho Kurokawa, 
Osaka
[f26]
Nakagin Capsule Tower, 1972
Kisho Kurokaw,
Tokyo
[f27]
Plug-in City Zoom-in, 1960-1974, 
Peter Cook, Archigram 
[f28]
Plug-in City, 1960-1974, 
Peter Cook, Archigram
Historically, the reaction to accommodating changes was the exploration of megastructures, metabolism, plug-in systems of flexibility. From London to Tokyo the interest of megastructures developed in their own way, attempting to increase user considerations and building lifespans while being environmentally conscious. Starting in the 1950s, architects such as Cedric Price, John Weeks, Richard Llewelyn Davies, Reyner Banham, Herman Hertzberger, Ezra Ehrenkantz, and Peter Cook, among others took a deep interest in developing architecture in ways that accommodated future change. Although never built, Joan Littlewood and Cedric Price’s Fun Palace [f21-22] was a proposed megastructure in which there was no definite pre-determined program. It was designed to allow for varying scales of program to take place, solely up to user discretion. While this project was designed with feasible construction assemblies to be realized, it never was. Public opinion fluctuated on the project as the design was adapted for various sites. Ultimately no site was selected and as a result it was never constructed.(14) Even if it had been constructed, part of Littlewood and Price’s design intention was that it would be deconstructed without leaving a trace behind. Almost as if there was a fear that somehow the megastructure would become obsolete, so removing it before it could was embedded in the design plan. Daniel Abramson discusses Price’s approach on avoiding designing architecture that would become obsolete along with his counterparts in his book titled Obsolescence.

The discussion of designing flexible spaces typically revolves around public spaces and programs that lend themselves to change, or have similar conditions. However John Weeks was focused on developing hospital design with future contingencies in mind. Weeks drove his hospital designs with the approach that the design is never finished. Not in such a way that the functional efficiency or assembly is not flushed out, but rather that the building must always be open to change and growth. When discussing Week’s work Abramson states, “Liberated from conventions of architectural authorship and functionalism, the designer alone “cannot determine what an indeterminate building will look like,” Weeks asserted.”(15) Northwick Park Hospital [f23-24] is specifically addressed and how certain facade elements are driven by engineers’ calculations, designed to best accommodate future changes.

Peter Cook’s Plug-in City and Kisho Kurokawa’s well known metabolism structures such as Takara Beautilion [f25] and the Nakagin Capsule Tower [f26] were also products of the widespread interest of designing for contingency of the time. Unlike Weeks’s hospitals and Kurokawa’s metabolist structures, the Plug-in City [f27-28]was not designed to be built. Rather it was applying the idea of a megastructure at an urban scale. Rather than a focus on a building’s function changing, the city would be accommodating the transition and change of how the city is circulated through. While this proposal expanded designing for change from the building to the urban scale, Kurokawa’s metabolist structures tightened this approach within the building scale. While his structures were still entire buildings, the mode of change was focused on the scale of a single room. Both Cook and Kurokawa, along with others, proposed designs that were composed as a kit of parts. Kits that work as a macro system with inserted parts allowing for the possibilities the system has taken into account. While these megastructure proposals hold a charm in their design, there are shortcomings embedded within the logic of a system. The system is its own limit, it can only accommodate what it has preemptively considered as possible futures. As stated in Adaptable Architecture, “Critics of accommodating change via moving components often disapprove of the predetermination of how a building can change. The argument against technical primacy is also expressed as implicit control over the user.”(16)

(14) Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA), “Dangerous, Immoral, Ahead of Its Time.”
(15) Daniel M. Abramson, Obsolescence: An Architectural History, 90-91.
(16) Robert Schmidt III, Simon Austin, Adaptable Architecture: Theory and Practice, 31.
ambiguous design

[f29]
HT Structure, 1955
Oskar Hansen, Lech Tomaszewski
Izmir International Fair
[f30]
Pavilion, 1959
Oskar Hansen
Sao Paulo International Fair
[f31]
Extension of the Zachęta Gallery in Warsaw, Oskar Hansen, Lech Tomaszewski, Stanislaw Zamecznik, 1958, The intention of adaptability can be seen in the way the floor plates are designed to be on a sliding track system, depicted in two different conditions in the model.

[f32]
Extension of the Zachęta Gallery in Warsaw, Oskar Hansen, Lech Tomaszewski, Stanislaw Zamecznik, 1958, The intention of adaptability can be seen in the way the floor plates are designed to be on a sliding track system, depicted in two different conditions in the model.
While most architects designing for change in the latter half of the 20th century were concentrated on megastructures and anticipating obsolescence, one designer was intrigued by designing for flexibility through indeterminate and ambiguous designs. Oskar Hansen’s Open Form Theory, developed in the late 1950s, strongly captures this sentiment of flexibility. Hansen started teaching at the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts in 1950 and eventually experimented with his design approach interests with his students. As Hansen was exploring his theory, he did so through pavilion designs that were constructed at a series of fairs in different cities – Stockholm in 1953, Izmir in 1955, and Sao Paulo in 1959.(17) The basis of the Open Form theory is, “that no artistic expression is complete until it has been appropriated by its users or beholders.”(18) Hansen’s theory brought a new intention to architectural design. It was not about proposing a design solution, but rather setting the stage for users to enter the creator role and bring on an identity to the design. In an interview with Wojciech Wlodarcyzk Hansen states, “Conceptualism results from the slavery of visible things, and what I propose are things that are as yet invisible. What I propose in Open Form is something that I cannot ultimately foresee. Open Form trusts people. My task is to believe in them and reveal them. Their story will be as they themselves are. His story will be as he himself is. The “art of events” – a polemic of visualized individual forms in a set of statements – will influence artists’ thinking. This will surely be an influence towards ‘democracy.’”(19) This response follows Wlodarcyzk bringing attention to Hansen referring to Open Form being an “art of events” and mental process. While there is no evidence of Hansen finding inspiration in Walter Benjamin’s essay on technological reproducibility and the conversation Benjamin sets up on consuming art and architecture passively,  it is easy to draw parallels between their interests and conversations regarding inviting people to an attentive state while existing in their surroundings. In terms of Hansen’s attitude as a designer, it is apparent that he saw necessary the transitioning of agency between designers and users. It could be said that Hansen believed the designer’s role was to create an offering for users to interact with. As a result, he did not have a strong aesthetic image or style he leaned towards. “Interesting to note is not only the aspect of openness towards context and to appropriation by users, but also Hansen’s understanding of form in its ability to anticipate unforeseen aspects, establishing indeterminacy as a core quality, or as Hansen said: ‘In my work the form can never be ideal.’”(20) His objective was to design to entice, not to create the perfect form or function.

(17) “Oskar Hansen.” Monoskop. 
(18) Axel Wieder and Florian Zeyfang, Open Form: Space, Interaction, and the Tradition of Oskar Hansen.
(19) Axel Wieder and Florian Zeyfang, Open Form: Space, Interaction, and the Tradition of Oskar Hansen, 31.
(20) Axel Wieder, Florian Zeyfang, Open Form: Space, Interaction, and the Tradition of Oskar Hansen, 57.

misuse, reuse, repurpose

[f33]
Kazakh Ice-fisherman reusing old bags to help keep their body heat close.
[f34]
Kazakh Ice-fisherman reusing old bags to help keep their body heat close.
[f35]
Kazakh Ice-fisherman reusing old bags to help keep their body heat close.

[f36]
Kazakh Ice-fisherman reusing old bags to help keep their body heat close.

[f37]
Tomiyasu Hayahisha, TTP, 2018

[f38]
Tomiyasu Hayahisha, TTP, 2018

[f39]
Tomiyasu Hayahisha, TTP, 2018

[f40]
Tomiyasu Hayahisha, TTP, 2018

[f41]
Tomiyasu Hayahisha, TTP, 2018

[f42]
Tomiyasu Hayahisha, TTP, 2018

[f43]
Road barriers being climbed on by children as they wait with their family to get food at a food truck lot.

[f44]
Play surface in Memorial City Mall, Houston, Texas

[45]
An area off of Brays Bayou Greenway Trail in which trunks and branches from fallen trees have been reorganized to turn them into inhabitable areas. Bayou Parkland, Houston, Texas

[46]
An area off of Brays Bayou Greenway Trail in which trunks and branches from fallen trees have been reorganized to turn them into inhabitable areas. Bayou Parkland, Houston, Texas
As the number of architects occupying themselves with designing for flexible uses slowly declined, the way in which people would repurpose or reuse spaces and things in ways they were not meant to did not. It does not take a creative motivation or design training to find unintended uses for objects. It simply requires that an individual’s desires are not met, and naturally they find an improvised solution with what is at hand. Architecture will always be recycled satisfying different needs, until deemed unsafe or unusable and it is erased. The repurposing of existing things is not only a practice at the building scale. Buildings may be repurposed many times, but require specialized labor, craftsmanship, and oversight. Objects at the human scale can be repurposed without any of these constraints. Consequently, examples can be seen more diversely, as people go about their day-to-day finding methods to satisfy their needs.    

The simple repurposing of bags can be seen being practiced by Kazakh ice fishers. As they sit for hours in the cold, their means of keeping warm is not from the use of researched fiber technology to make coats appropriate for these men, but rather by cloaking themselves in remnants of rice and grocery bags, trapping their body heat close to themselves.

Tomiyasu Hayahisha published TTP in 2018, documenting a collection of images taken from the same location over four years. While the original intention was to document a specific fox, he ended up with images showing the use of a ping pong table in nearly every way other than its original intended use. These images are expressing the needs of the community using the park. The intention here is not to say the park needs all the independent functions these individuals have assigned to the ping pong table, but to recognize how an object as simple as a table can be utilized in hundreds of ways when it needs to be.

The most common and expected condition of object misuse is kids at a playground. Playgrounds are safe spaces for kids to express and entertain themselves. Though the average kid does not need a playground to find entertainment, they can often do this through irregular instances of regular objects. In urban contexts, objects such as road barriers can be seen as an obstacle course [f43]. Playful topography with a soft surface can be enough to keep children occupied within a specific domain [f44]. Tree branches and trunks fallen from high wind storms can be rearranged to create benches and shelter [f45]. The nature and context of misuse, reuse, and undefined use captured in these scenarios along with the ice fishers and Hayahisha’s images parallel the interest and study of projecting uses onto ambiguous objects this thesis developed.  






Feyza Mutlu
Master of Architecture Thesis
Rice University School of Architecture linkedin.com/in/feyza-mutlu
fnmutlu1@gmail.com
@fnmutlu1