This studio explored architecture as a negotiation between order and deviation — the friction between systems that impose clarity and control, and forces that introduce uncertainty and give. Students examined two opposing design impulses: a rationalizing logic rooted in American framing traditions and modernist grids, where repetition and structure produce discipline and legibility; and a softening counter-impulse, where form resists fixed geometry and behaves with elasticity, ambiguity, and material give.

These tendencies were tested directly through the design of a small pavilion for two inhabitants — a scale intentionally chosen to make the friction between hard and soft systems legible in a single, complete architectural gesture. The pavilion became a vehicle for asking a foundational question: what happens when a rigid structural framework is infiltrated, bent, or wrapped by a more pliable system that pushes back against it? Students used materiality and tectonics not as neutral means of enclosure, but as active agents capable of destabilizing conventional hierarchies between structure and skin, precision and imprecision.

The result is architecture understood not as the resolution of these opposing logics, but as the space produced by their ongoing tension.

Student work (in order): Colin Spoerndle, Sofia Policano, Saloni Singh