GHASSAN ALSERAYHI
 MSc. Arch, M. Arch, B. Arch, Assoc. SCE

ARCHITECT + EDUCATOR + RESEARCHER
‘LIMINAL CHRYSALIS: CHAMBER OF MEMORIES’
‘THE REALM OF (RE)PRODUCTION’


SUBJECT: ‘PROPOSITIONS’: ‘SOFT BODIES...WEAK BUILDINGS’
TYPE: DESIGN STUDIO
INSTRUCTOR: ADAM MILLER
DATE: 2022
What characterizes the architecture of the limp, floppy, soft, wobbly, delicate, exhausted, tender, wasted, weak, and forceless? What unique contributions can bodies make to architecture that buildings cannot? Instead of embracing a singular vision of beauty, ‘strong’ architecture often imposes a ‘totalizing’ definition. Historically, this definition has been rooted in public, masculine, straight, and white ideals, inadvertently excluding and silencing many voices. The link between masculinity and beauty may not be immediately apparent, but it becomes more evident when we examine the post-industrial aesthetics of Modernism. Modernism celebrates sleek, masculine monumentality while rejecting ornamental, curvaceous, and non-Western aesthetics, which are often coded as feminine, weak, and inferior, with Modernism itself often associated with whiteness.

The consequences of such a rigid and controlling approach to design are evident in the world around us. The prompt of the studio aims to reclaim the power of weakness and the strength of softness. Students were asked to explore what does an architecture of tender masculinity look like? What are the politics behind a soft-bodied architecture? This work develops its own hybrid aesthetics, starting from its unique aesthetic perspectives and combining them with elements of softness, hardness, masculinity, femininity, and more. It embraces soft materials at various scales, utilizing digital and physical constructing techniques to model soft body physics in the design of clothing, furniture, and narratives. The resulted models are inflatable, stuffed, floppy, and soft, both in digital and physical forms. Furniture and clothing designs, including prototypes, are realized at a 1:1 scale.












PART ONE

In this part of the work, the focus is on designing clothing for an object that is anything but objective. The selected object is a domestic item that evokes a particular emotional response in me, as a creator. Through various aesthetic studies, the emotions this object elicits in me, both as a user and designer, are analyzed and described in aesthetic terms using the ‘Soft-Hard Politigram.’ This diagram encompasses three areas: Function and Uses, Meanings and Associations, Material, and Furniture Typologies.






 
  















PART TWO

This project expands the earlier design (indivisual work) into larger ‘furniture’ pieces with a hybrid aesthetic (from another student’s work), exploring the evolving roles and meanings of furniture. This proposed hybrid object challenges the limitations of naming and defining objects, considering their constrains on our perception of their materiality and function. Inspired by Alan Watts’ concept of finding depth in simplicity and ‘nothingness,’ the design promotes undetermind and experience-based purposes, questioning the temporalities and purposes of deisng and the traditional views of furniture as mere functional items. It critiques the practice of labeling objects, proposing a scenario where ‘The chair’ might want to transcend its role, embodying different forms and meanings over time.