Dwell Home II
2005A concurrent series of competitions allowed us the latitude to magnify and amplify some of the scopic dynamics that we prototyped in the smaller local work. At both scales, a common set of strategies and operations guide the exploration – the criteria of scope, scape and shape all pertained differently but equally in each example. The competitions explored the merger of new design methods and advanced projection technologies. We were interested in both the practical and utopian extremes of architectural speculation, especially the myriad ways space and geometry orchestrate vision.
Beginning with an invited competition in 2005 sponsored by Dwell magazine for the “Dwell Home 2,” we answered a series of residential and larger-scale calls for entries. These competition proposals allowed us to test a variety of ideas and approaches; in retrospect, they ran in two strains, the propositional and the iterative. The propositional projects operated from an imposed conceptual agenda: in the Dwell Home 2, a series of five optional designs for the model home paralleled the stages of Lars von Trier’s Five Obstructions, for example, and in the Museum of Polish History, a pattern of vectors based on military incursions through that nation shaped the design. The iterative entries were by contrast cummulative, and sought to take a promising aspect of the earlier project further, or to new ends.