PARADIGM MAP

MAP, 22"x33" ON STRATHMORE



10/27/2010

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PARADIGM MAP
co work with James Lee

All inhabitable artificial environment must have provided a space with conditioned air regardless of its physical constraints and its scale. Especially, since the emergence of mechanically generated or conditioned air, many different kinds of architectural intervention have tried to create a dialogue with the technological innovation in air. We recognize primary air conditioning technological inventions chronologically, and how each architectural intervention or artificial environment is positioned and related itself along with these technologies.

This map is about the modern history of air and underground architecture from the 1800s to present. This modern history along with the technological advancement tells us about what has enabled us to extend our physical territories to unexplored areas in architecture. We have started to trace the historical events in technology and set up the ground (plane) on which the precedents we have researched would be located. One row of the major events in the air-conditioning, heating and lighting technologies is placed in the center as we both share them as the important historical moments, and those unique to our separate interests are put on the top or at the bottom row. The two horizontal strips (the light gray as air and the black as underground) can be read separately, while those two together are meant to be understood as the one mirrored image of the air and underground section. As the technology advances, the attempts to occupy the unexplored territories have become more frequent at the various scales from personal spaces to urban mega-structures, you may see the denser populations at a certain moment of the history or the emerging types of architecture in the different social and cultural contexts. At the end, we hope to locate and connect our thesis within these discourses, and our architectural interventions may operate within the dominant paradigms on the map or suggest a paradigm shift.