Architecture Through Gaze / December 2024
Within the disciplinary field of architecture, the gaze has traditionally functioned as a latent but unquestioned mechanism, one that stabilizes relations between subject, object, and space. This thesis does not treat the gaze as a representational phenomenon, but as an operative structure that precedes form. The project is therefore less concerned with what is seen than with the conditions under which seeing is produced, deferred, or rendered indeterminate.
The work situates itself between Foucault’s spatialization of power and Žižek’s reformulation of visibility as an ontological condition. Rather than synthesizing these frameworks, the project sustains their incompatibility. The result is a spatial argument that resists closure, in which architecture functions as a site of theoretical friction rather than resolution. The theater is selected not for its cultural familiarity, but for its capacity to formalize the gaze as an architectural instrument. It is a typology already encoded with hierarchy, orientation, and visual authority.
These inherited structures are systematically destabilized. The proscenium no longer secures a fixed relationship between observer and observed. Spatial boundaries dissolve into a field of competing vantage points. The gaze circulates without anchoring itself to a singular position. In this condition, the observer is no longer external to the architectural system, but implicated within it. Vision becomes recursive, folding back onto itself.
What emerges is neither panoptic nor anti-panoptic. Instead, the project operates within a para-optical condition, one in which visibility is partial, displaced, and continuously renegotiated. Architecture ceases to act as a device of control or legibility and instead becomes a medium through which exposure is produced as an experiential state. Urban space is reframed as performative rather than consumptive, and subjectivity is constituted through appearance rather than occupation.
In this sense, the project does not propose architecture as an object, but as an event. It does not resolve the gaze, but suspends it. The architectural form functions as a trace of looking, of being looked at, and of the instability that arises when spatial authority is no longer centralized. The work thus enacts its own theoretical premise, transforming architecture from a container of vision into a condition that continuously questions the act of seeing itself.
Fenway, Boston, Massachusetts