Form is not the future. In fact, form is very much a product of the past – of past cycles of production and reappropriation. That is to say that we- as a collective body of producers of architecture- have relegated the processes of form finding to image-making, with the intention of producing an image capable of asserting itself in the overpopulated media environment that is the internet. In a world of immediate and infinite production of buildings and culture, the communication of images as languages of design has sculpted a catalog of architectural forms – virtual identities- whose formal specifications have brought about a favorable reaction in the digital realm. The near-arbitrary nature of this reaction has diluted the role of formal specificity in the practice, as spatial or contextual complexities are often satisfied by visiting a rotating carousel of images and formal gestures discovered or recycled from internet exposure.

The intention of this project is to counter the nature of lost specificity in reappropriated form, by proposing a system in which formal profiles are generated and hidden to avoid rebranding as an image to be disseminated on the virtual marketplace. By utilizing a standardized system of concrete slab construction, one of the “typical” construction practices in the global city, the formal gestures and internal specificities nestled within the system are shielded from a superficial level of formal reappropriation. Operating around these spaces are uses not beholden to a specific architectural or spatial system, programs in which the “generic” system is in fact the best template. Within these forms, specific programmatic areas are created that are inherently operating under the architectural bounds in which they exist. The intention is to create a combination of cultures, the operation of the specific and the flexible, the generic and the hyper formal within one building.