The Cooper Union
Bachelor of Architecture Program
Project Name: Architectonics, Fall 2020: Masked
To mask is to partially cover: a mask removes context, but also creates focus and even allows for abstraction. It lets us decide what is important. But masking also allows for invention—we can fill in what we don’t know, or what we’ve removed. It can let us see something anew. This first year Architectonics studio prompted students to use masking as a way to invent a fictional space, a public room to enact public rituals. Students experimented with scaleless geometric protocols to discover new types of space. They began by studying precedents of public spaces, saturated with their contexts, histories, and particularities. Masked from their buildings, they developed a new vocabulary of spatial behaviors to perform, and new spacesin which to perform them.
