THE SYNTHETIC MUSEUM / MASTERS THESIS

^{Advisor Prof. Andrew Colopy, Fall 2019}


Architects navigate a vast sea of information using rules of thumb.

When designers in the field, collaborating with engineers and consultants, have bypassed these rules in favor of working directly with raw data (whether to do with use, structure, lighting, etc.), it has typically been for the sake of saving cost, time, or material, or otherwise improving functionality.

As a consequence, the scope of design in these cases is narrowed and the process reoriented into a convergent, solution-driven exercise.

This thesis argues that information itself (increasingly digitized) has always been architecture’s most essential material, but asserts that embracing it as such need not lead to positivism.

Accordingly, THE SYNTHETIC MUSEUM presents an alternative, divergent methodology demonstrating data as medium in architecture. It  plays out in the increasingly data-rich environment of the museum, taking visitor behavior as its focus.

The demonstration of this methodology starts with two rules of thumb regarding how visitors move through exhibits, one about “inertia” and one regarding “interest” (see below.) These rules are reverse-engineered through close examination and testing with a simple grasshopper script into indices -- termed here the “wandering index” and “focus index.” These indices are then deployed iteratively and divergently to produce a single museum interior that can be circulated through in four measurably distinct ways.

Through this process, the binary, neutral space described by rules of thumb (“yes, this is permissable”/“no, this is not”) is discretized into a charged field of quantum potentials.

Efficiency and inefficiency are leveled.

And the synthesis of a complex set of possibilities emerges as a richer alternative to efficiency alone.