Syracuse University
Nile Greenberg and Michael Abel Deng
Visting Critic Studios, Abel Nile New York
No functionalism, no program. Architecture is increasingly asked to contain things it cannot fully predict. Buildings must accommodate changing uses, new regulations, fluctuating markets, evolving technologies, environmental risk, and occupants who may not yet be known. The result is a peculiar contemporary condition: exteriors become more tightly specified even as interiors become more indeterminate.
This studio will design a building of speculative use and the architectural performance of its shell. Its social and economic value is its potential uses and the risks of its controlled envelope. It amounts to the status of architecture today: Hollow.
Hollowness is a slowly curing force defining contemporary construction and architecture. Within the envelope we find a thin and intense assemblage of materials, definitions of legal jurisdiction, performance metrics, BIM management, insurance policies, structure, warranties, assembly instructions and maintenance contracts. Meanwhile the interior has become the scope of another time, an indeterminate space without functionalism, only potentiality. Its vacuity becomes its quality. Today emptiness itself has become the primary product, but hollow suggests solidity too. Its expression is a closed, taut environmentally sound envelope.
Architecture has become strangely inverted. The edge becomes dense while the center becomes empty. This studio proposes an architecture for this kind of indeterminacy. The studio does not ask students to design buildings without use. It suspends program as the primary generator of architecture while refusing the idea that an open future requires infinite space. Instead, students will explore how indeterminate use might be held within buildings that accept limits and make those limits formally consequential.
Climate, gravity, fire, water, structure, energy, construction, regulation, liability, and finance will become the material of architecture rather than technical problems to be resolved afterward.
This means that a programless building may be more constrained, not less. Structure may interrupt the interior. Fire separation may divide it. Flood levels may lift it. Snow may deform its roof. Thermal performance may thicken its walls. Material dimensions may determine its span. Regulation may create discontinuities. The building remains open to changing occupations, but its form is no longer generic. Deregulation encourages buildings to remain interchangeable so they can be leased, converted, and sold. Regulation appears to do the opposite by prescribing performance through codes, energy standards, insurance requirements, and liability. Yet together they often produce the same result: a heavily specified shell surrounding an increasingly unspecified interior. The hollow building is their joint product.