Alluding to the potential of bricolage to produce hybrid forms based on the overlay of formal thoughts. Parti Wall is a performance that through active negotiation exposed the architectural sensibilities of the 9 mentor-led teams that occupy the 9 cells in the grid. Over the span of a single weekend, teams of mentors and students were asked to negotiate the boundaries that define their respective spaces while taking a position that leads to the co-construction of the walls that surround them.
Not only a purely extruded plane, walls are tectonic figurations that communicate ideology making them important as both a constructed component and over time a disciplinary marker. Stemming from the French term Prendre Parti, meaning ‘to make a decision,’ the Parti is considered to be the chief organizing thought behind an architect’s design. The combination of terms, Parti Wall, alludes to the potential of bricolage to produce hybrid forms based on the overlay of formal thoughts between two neighboring designers.
Sited in the central atrium of Slocum Hall, on axis with the Marble Room; the production of the project proposes a certain reverence to some of the principles that this school was built upon. While we associate the 9 square as a 20th century problem in architecture, in reality the Texas Rangers came upon a useful formal and spatial device that lends itself towards reinvention – for example Eisenman’s 9 square is not Koolhaas’s 9 square, is not the Courthouse in Lockhart, Texas. Unlike the foursquare, or other geometries, the 9 square has a clear perimeter and a clear center. The versatility of the 9 square problem over time has offered several iterations: as an abstract spatial problem, a project on tectonics, and an indexing of form, and my reading as an infrastructure for an event.
In this rendition of the 9 square project, over the span of a single weekend two authors negotiated over the boundaries that define their respective spaces– with a particular interest in the center, edge, and surface. Each teams cell has an ideology or theme that takes a position towards the co-construction of the walls that surround them.
Video by: Nicholas Ferreiro
