Absolutes, for Now
2018 // Long Beach, CA // Museum // Speculative
The project serves as an investigation into truth, of fact, and of fiction, and the role of the museum and of architecture in today’s post-truth world, where objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief. The project seeks to reinterpret the museum through an architecture of blur: a place in-between, that compresses and stretches conceptions of behavior, knowledge, truth, facts, and fictions, creating an architecture that simultaneously differentiates and overlays possible pasts and hypothetical futures. Museums transport us to places that provide absolute order in an unknowable and unpredictable world, pure bliss and ferocious fantasy in a routine and dull existence, and everything in between. They are terribly carnal, or inflexibly automated, a counter, a reveal, and a reflection to the existing state of the real. Moreover, they are comfortable in their impermanence; they understand the relativity of the truths they abide by. It is the ambition of the project to attempt to capture this flicker between fact and fiction, through a transformation of program and site, to not only expose absolutes as simply absolutes for now, but to celebrate this idea, and through this, address architecture’s aspiration to create thrilling spaces that instill in our imagination not what is, but what could be.
