Wrinkles

Installation of Drawings, Artifacts, Essay, Film; at MIT, 2023





A building is never a static object but a living being that grows and ages - a building exchanges care. Such acts of reciprocated caretaking weave a delicate, multifaceted symbiosis between architecture and people. 
Rooted in an anonymous residential building in the center of Mexico City - one with 70 years of history being born, lived, earthquake-destructed, abandoned, repaired, rejuvenated, and cared for - this thesis borrows “wrinkles” as a conceptual thread to investigate the correlation between a building’s life cycle and the life cycles of the community formed within. Harnessing the camera as a spatial tool that enables 3D scanning and robotic printing, this project braids embodied data with empirical research, and manifests itself in an experimental multimedia film. From matters to actions, between structures and bodies, an alternative literacy is composed that breaks the binary of before/after in architecture design. The prolonged liminality of collective authorship becomes foregrounded, that dwells in the easily unaccountable acts of everyday caretaking against enduring inequities in labor and gender.



 

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“This building is not just composed of 16 floor slabs and 40 walls. But rather, 160,000 broom strokes, 24,000 wipes, 10,000 hammering, 200 pipe replacements, and so on.”









view the film here

Special thanks to my advisor William O’Brien Jr. and my readers, Jeffrey Landman, Rosalyne Shieh, and Anne Whiston Spirn
© 2022 Daisy Ziyan Zhang