Master of Architecture Thesis Rice University 
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