Philadelphian Obfuscation

cRITIC

Ryan Palidar

TEAM

Benjamin Scott Oliver - Wai Hong Conrad Tse - Sydney Cleveland-Datesman

Philadelphia’s buildings are immaterial, their representation is an assembly of various forms and building techniques. By upwardly reducing these qualities we can create an object that is a newcomposition of these qualities that cannot be reduced to a sum of its parts without losing the object they create.1Philadelphian obfuscation is an aggregation of curved and rectilinear objects that represent the various topologies used in the city of Philadelphia. By projecting the city’s grid onto our combined objects, the solids and voids of the form are lost in the extending lines that make up the roads and building blocks of Philly. The grid works as an extension of these lines to further blur the boundaries between object and void.Our objects are amalgamations of the architectural essences that exist in many worksthroughout Philadelphia. The basis is to create a new object from the combination and manipulation of rectilinear and curvilinear geometries that appear in our environment. We aim to disallow the reduction of this object through methods of obfuscation. Fabrication to intentionally create various readings depending on the position of the observer, as well as the conceptual object being composed of various “phases” of material, will create multiple readings of the composition.