This thesis was an investigation on collaboration, ways of working and producing, some of the dialogues begun here are still ongoing.

Abstract: Extrajudicial Ecologies, Architecture on Trial

This thesis establishes a new judicial body for spatial equity. The courthouse spatializes the material culture of the criminal and civil judicial apparatus. In his definition, Giorgio Agamben locates the term apparatus at the intersection of diverse flows of power and characterized by the breadth of its effects or the reach of knowledge production. Through the structure of the trial, the thesis seeks to leverage architecture as an apparatus that makes explicit the hidden structures at play in the world governing civic space. The territories made explicit through architecture are vast. From domestic interiors, massive sites of resource extraction, rapid urbanization, and ecological disasters, to sports arenas,  historic preservation, mainstream media, and digital computing clouds the apparatus of architecture is pervasive. 

The spectrum of complexities facing architects forces them to react by isolating singular methodologies to work on singular problems. Instead of a project of narrowing down, this thesis works to make evident the way architecture can act on such simultaneous complexities within contemporary culture. Methods of co-producing widen the necessary thesis bandwidth. The attitude towards the work is one of “all layers on”, and as such amplifies architectural operations that exist in today's intricately complex sphere of influences. Dual efforts of production are used to open up and intensify scope of the architecture and translate this body of work into highly specific architectural forms, spaces and materials. The thesis positions architecture as an operative actant – a civic actor and formal object leveraging its role as an apparatus producing effect beyond itself. 

“The role of architecture might just be to remind people that everything is not all right.” -Peter Eisenman

“satisficing,” an unstable combination of satisfying and sufficing. -Sanford Kwinter

“You should not try to find whether an idea is just or correct.  You should look for a completely different idea, elsewhere in another area, so that something passes between the two which is neither in one nor the other.”  -  “Now, one does not usually find this idea alone, a chance is needed, or else someone gives you one.”

In Dialogues, Deleuze lays out a model of working that exists not in the minds-eye of one person but flourishes in the “between-twos”.  To work in isolation is to preclude life-becoming of an idea.  Transmissibility and mis-interpretation become players in a game where no-one wins but every-one benefits from the exchange.  This thesis is to be an earnest effort in collaboration, communication and most importantly-- the action of operative difference in order to produce a more rigorous investigation/provocation.