(Close) Reading Morphosis

Supervisor: Denis Derycke
Submitted on September 2021

Abstract:
During the second half of the 1980s, Thom Mayne and Michael Rotondi - founders of Morphosis - invested themselves in an architectural research, involving complex strategies of composition, as well as an extremely thoughtful transgression of representation's norms : their production reflects a richness of the compositional process and a rigorous mastery of the representational tool. Presented without explanations, this production exists only through iconic graphic abjects, closed on themselves with all the complexity they tend to communicate, and calling to decipher them in order to extract the richness they seem to encapsulate. The present research therefore aims at proposing an interpretive reading of Morphosis's architectural language, through graphic representation and the production of documents likely to bring new knowledge on their universe. This on a corpus of study composed of two projects from the 1980s, namely: the Crawford Residence (1988) & the Malibu House (1986). The aim would be both to understand and expose compositional and representational mechanisms involved in these projects, as well as to speculate, through an interpretive graphic production, on the process that could have generated them, and can potentially give birth to multiple alternative formal configurations.