Speculative Artifacts

Thesis is both culmination and departure. It gathers years of design study into a concentrated moment of experimentation, where ideas and questions are tested against form. At the same time, it signals a beginning into futures not yet defined.

Speculative Artifacts presents 18 thesis projects from recent graduates of the M.Arch and B.Arch programs at SCI-Arc. Each work approaches architecture as a propositional medium. They are not final answers but artifacts of inquiry, carrying traces of experimentation and speculation. Drawings, models, films, and digital constructs are treated as sites where architecture thinks. They are not secondary to buildings, but the very places where architecture imagines, proposes, and rehearses possibilities.

Translation runs through these projects. Scale becomes political as architecture moves between background and foreground in the public realm. Material states shift between raw and abstracted, altering how we perceive consumption and exchange. Code folds into matter, where instructions and tolerances negotiate to generate form. Translation here is not a simple reproduction, it shifts, adapts, and invents. Artifacts carry these translations, mediating between analog and digital, material and immaterial, the real and the imagined.

To call them artifacts is to underline their double role. They are physical, made from wood, paper, pixels, and code, yet also provisional, standing in for ideas larger than themselves. They embody architecture’s capacity to experiment not only with form, but with method, narrative, and imagination.

In the gallery the works step outside the format of the academic review. Seen together they become cultural propositions that show architecture not only as the making of buildings but as a representational practice of translation and speculation that continually redefines its own conditions. Here, artifacts are not signs of closure but instruments of possibility.

Artists:
Shaheen Bharwani
Esteban Chavez
Yuhang Chen
Yi Cheung
Spencer Clark
Jack Han
Sean Keeley
Sam Lay
Kimberly Leon
Acacia Li
Maxwell Lorenze
Noah Losani
Quinn McCormack
Emir Saydan
Holland Seropian
Emine Simsek
Brian Slusher
Carson Somer
Jack Wasielewski
Kevin Xu

Curators:
Jackilin Hah Bloom, Graduate Thesis Coordinator
Maxi Spina, Undergraduate Thesis Coordinator

Hosted by Art/Space 114 in collaboration with 2413 Hyperion