We believe that the act of building and of making itself is a form of knowledge production. As a point of departure, we built a ten foot by ten foot by ten foot cube, accepting Dom Haans van der Laan’s thesis that shelter begins with a roof, to protect the body from the elements, and that architecture begins with the wall, to demarcate the rituals of daily life within the infinite vertical and horizontal plains we find our bodies.

The structure was assembled by framing along the seams of plywood offcuts. Almost every component of the project was sourced as surplus, offcuts, or excess material collected from construction sites and building suppliers. The reuse of scrap material provided a constructed found condition to react to once occupancy began. The building was then covered in roofing tar, which not only sealed it from the elements but provided an apt allusion to the theatrical black box, a tabula rasa for a variety of unprecedented interactions.

We lived within the project as it took shape, inhabiting the space in parallel with its construction so that making and dwelling became inseparable acts of inquiry. As we built, we worked synchronously on drawings and models of the construction and camera stands from which to serially photograph the building, establishing the base from which our experiment could begin.