One of our favorite things about architecture school is the ability to go nuts and create forms from anything you can think of.  We’r really diggin’ this project from Ben at SCI-Arc.  Using a pattern within a field condition, he creates living spaces at different scales, using the same tessellated pattern.  The graphics are what we really like about this project, going nuts with color, providing a playful change to the normal black and white drawings.

STUDENT: Ben Warwas
SCHOOL: SCI-ARC
PROFESSORS: Florencia Pita
COURSE: M. Thesis –  Best Thesis award
YEAR: 2012

“The field has been used to create and describe many different aspects of architecture at various scales. But when the field is used as a vacant pattern to liberate architecture from the dead weight of theory and pure space it becomes the most powerful. This method can be traced through time from Baroque church ceilings to Robert Venturi’s Best store’s flower application and into contemporary times with FAT architects proto post-modernism’s extruded cartoon details. Field so good has taken these techniques and developed them into an architecture that combines form with the application of field into a cohesive result.

                Field so Good starts with a vacant shape that is made of a combination of lines and curves, these shapes are then repeated using oscillation instead of typical repetition. The patterns always include a diagonal and a straight line to give the illusion of movement. This pattern is then used as the design tool to produce the work. The pattern defines the form and the openings to create cohesion between fenestration and building. The patterns applied to two-dimensional surfaces are imitating three-dimensional forms to create a play between the real and the fake. The openings are always part of the pattern and never thought about as a different part of the design. The form itself is an extrusion of the pattern in an attempt to flatten the form into a two-dimensional reading. The heavy use of color is to augment the playfulness of the thesis. The combination of the pattern as form/openings/appliqué turns these vacant patterns into a field: Field So Good.

                A home and a residential tower have been designed using the Field so Good technique. These two projects are a demonstration of the scalar ability of the system used to design them. The field operates as intimate texture at the personal scale of the home and as an expansive field of fantasy at the urban scale of the tower. The heavy patterning on the tower acknowledges the immense size of the skyscraper as an alternate reality in the same way baroque church ceilings were used to entice nonbelievers into faith. The house offers the same solace to the residential neighborhood from the overwhelming sameness of contemporary suburbia.”  – Ben Warwas

“Field So Good produces an architecture that is alive with pleasure”

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