UnBuilding Building

Princeton School of Architecture is pleased to announce UnBuilding Building, an online exhibition by the 2020 Post-Professional M.Arch Thesis class coordinated by Professor Jesse Reiser. The website showcases projects by five students—Catherine Ahn, Esra Durukan, Sarah Etaat, Kyle Weeks, and Olga Zakharova—collectively named “V”.

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.

V
2020

A Porous Poche
Catherine Ahn
Advisor: Paul Lewis

Cakes for Sale
Esra Durukan
Advisors: Michael Meredith + Sylvia Lavin

Seam Houses
Sarah Etaat
Advisor: Stan Allen

The (other) Shed
Kyle Weeks
Advisor: Monica Ponce de Leon

Theatrical Urbanism
Olga Zakharova
Advisor: Cameron Wu

Follow V at @just________v