Architecture lecture focuses on modifying details to create intriguing designs
William O’Brien Jr. is Associate Professor at the MIT Department of Architecture and is Principal of WOJR, an independent design practice in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He is the Architectural Design Lead at Samara in San Francisco and is one of the founding members of the collaborative practice, Collective–LOK. O'Brien will give a lecture in the UCLA Departments of Architecture & Urban Design on Monday, Apr. 29, 2019.
William O’Brien Jr., an associate professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, will give a talk on Monday in Perloff Hall as part of the latest iteration of UCLA’s Architecture and Urban Design lecture series. His talk will highlight his recent works with William O'Brien Jr., or WOJR, his independent design firm. (Courtesy of the company William O’Brien Jr.) "Architecture can feel unfamiliar without simultaneously feeling alien – William O’Brien Jr. will propose this idea in his upcoming lecture at UCLA.
Instead of generating entire architectural structures that jar the senses, O’Brien said he is interested in modifying small details that will fascinate audiences without unsettling them. O’Brien, an associate professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology will give a talk Monday in Perloff Hall as part of the latest iteration of UCLA’s Architecture and Urban Design lecture series.
The talk will highlight his recent works in production at William O’Brien Jr., or WOJR, his independent design firm in Cambridge, Massachusetts. In an age where architectural knowledge is readily available online, he said he hopes the conversational style of his lecture will help students better understand his professional motivations. During the presentation, O’Brien. will also demonstrate how architecture can include digital advancements within the creative process but does not need to become dependent on technology.
“There’s a kind of post-digital agenda latent in the work,” O’Brien said. “We’re interested in making work that is not alien, but ‘other,’ by way of defamiliarization.”
In the past, O’Brien said, architects were fascinated with making unusual structures that felt completely foreign upon first glance – the advancement of digital technology allowed for this kind of experimentation, which often went too far, he said. Instead of producing entirely alien designs, O’Brien said his firm is more interested in tweaking minor details to achieve a sense of unfamiliarity in his works. One of these minor details O’Brien played around with is the proportion of a roof to the rest of a building as seen in his recent project, House of the Woodland, a New England home that is currently in construction.
“We changed the proportion of one thing to take it away from what you thought you knew to something which is uncanny or weird or a little bit different,” O’Brien said."— Paige Hua, Apr. 25, 2019
This post is an excerpt. Read the full article on the Daily Bruin website.
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