UnBuilding Building

Our built environment is in a constant state of destabilization by changing environments, influences, and functions. In a landscape where architecture is often pushed to sublimate into other types of creative practices, permanence in architecture is no longer something that can be taken for granted. We confront this question of permanence of buildings through actively constructing and deconstructing them. To the provocation we present a gradient of positions that range from the very permanent to the very temporal, which all seek to destabilize an explicit binary between the two.

The five projects exhibited here are conducted in the context of the Post-Professional M.Arch program at Princeton University School of Architecture where there is a unique opportunity for professionally trained architects to return to the university to pursue a two-year program culminating in a thesis. Here, design itself is considered a form of research, and in this sense, the work shown here is unfinished—a first expression rather than a last. Hovering between academia and professional practice, these projects strive to open up new directions for architecture and offer a collective position on the future of our built world.

The 2020 Post-Professional M.Arch Thesis class is coordinated by Professor Jesse Reiser.

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