Muy Fantastico!

One of the things my advisor M suggested I do to get ideas for my thesis project was to make a list of things that are totally awesome and fantastic about these miroarchitectural articulations (or MA's). I'm much more critical than positive and tend to have problems arguing in favour of my ideas, but I thought I would give it a shot. So, in no particular order, here are some reasons MA's are the best thing evah.

• They provide a mechanism for architects to investigate the composition of solids and voids (a good exercise for architects, but it's unlikely that laymen would care)
• They encourage users to interact with the designed space (almost always a good thing, unless you have a problem with homeless people lying around your building)
• They add human scale to buildings (I think this is one of the best reasons to use them because the zoom capabilities of AutoCAD make it easy for architects to remember what size a person is in their building and so make spaces far larger than they need to be)
• They mediate between specificity and flexibility, allowing designers to create one space that encourages lots of different uses (this is the main argument in my Directed Studies)
• They encourage architects to use a new design strategy and work from small details up to a building (I like this one a lot because being an architect is all about having lots of different design strategies that you can deploy in different situations. They're the tools in our toolbox, and are far more useful than knowing how to use AutoCAD)
• They encourage playful interaction in buildings (this is similar to encouraging interaction, but the key word here is play. Because the surfaces are ambiguous, people need to think about how they might want to sit or work on them, and I hope that increased awareness of bodies in space will lead users to test their own physical boundaries and consider what is comfortable for them.
• They can be combined/assembled to fit any program and any site (not a great argument, because this is true of most design things)

I think of these, the idea of a different design strategy is the most interesting, then the idea of human scale, and finally the interaction argument. Of course, the point of MA's is that they allow architects to combine physically demanding programs in new ways. It's taken me a while to realize this, but I am comfortable arguing that surface articulations of this kind are most useful when programs that need permanent fixtures such as benches, tables, stairs, podiums, counters, chairs and risers are combined. An example of this could be the combination of a movie theater and a lunch counter (the second program still needs a little work, I think).

A movie theater has very specific physical needs. There must be seats, a screen, and some mechanism that allows everyone to see the screen (be that a raised screen or raked seating). A lunch counter has very different needs: a counter that is close to a kitchen and some kind of seating. Microarchitectural articulations are designed to mediate between these two programs and create possibilities for other, unrelated kinds of use.