The architectural proposal stems from experimental research that confronts the notions of light, time, projection, flatness, depth, and misreading. At its core, this body of work is about questioning the means, media, and methods employed by architects. By utilizing the form of a cube in each set of experiments, this base spatial typology can be complexified in the subsequent design process.

Inspired by several camera-less photography methods, a machine was developed that replaces the camera, capturing code, algorithms, and digital form instead of scenes or portraits in a process that marries analog and digital. Photography is fundamentally time and light, captured by either a digital sensor or film. Camera-less photography takes the camera out of the equation and works directly with the manipulation of light and photo paper in an inherently analog way. Conventional techniques typically go through a process where the whole paper is exposed and then goes through several complete baths.

An FDM printer was hacked to expose photo paper with moving light. This process allows for the exposure of small areas. It is both a numerically controlled camera and darkroom, capable of variable localized exposure. By hacking a purpose-built machine and replacing two fundamentally efficient processes with an indirect method of producing an image, the machine critiques the efficiency of technology and productive processes. Form and space are digested through this system, providing a new way of seeing. Drawings explore the possibilities of light as an architectural medium in a way that embeds the notion of time.

Exposure is controlled by two factors: the amount of light and the duration of exposure. As the photographic paper is optimized for the amount of light used in traditional darkroom techniques, exposure times with a laser are very short. This means that the optimal strength is low-power lasers, which inherently have low-quality lenses. Cheaper lenses usually lend themselves to a shorter dispersion and focus range. The drawing implications of this are that the further the laser is from the paper, the less powerful and concentrated the light. This dynamic process produces natural line weights in the drawings. By drawing with light in three-dimensional Cartesian space, the three-dimensional information is translated into the drawings.

Traditionally, drawings exist in a single (x-y) plane. Introducing a third dimension in a drawing by building off of the mechanics of lenticular images, graphics can be created that act dynamically within a space or on a form. Lenticular images rely on a wavy lens overlaid on top of an image that has been interlaced. This optical device allows the image to change as the viewing angle changes. 

Using the Digital Camera Obscura, a process was designed that employs three-dimensional interlaced projection: a two-dimensional drawing onto a three-dimensional surface. By coordinating the drawing with the 3D-printed medium, the mechanics of a lenticular lens are employed at a larger scale. The surface was coated in emulsion to map the drawing on the surface as had been previously done with photo paper.

The potential of light as an ingredient of architecture was analyzed by exploring it as a medium that augments and interacts with another material in space and time. Light has the power to augment an onlooker’s perception of form and space in a way that no other architectural material can. It is dynamic, interactive, intimate, and immaterial.

The human eye is incapable of truly seeing form or space. What is seen as an object is merely the light reflected off of it. By augmenting the light that is being perceived without changing the form itself, the difference between form and perceived form is muddled. Using a projector with scripted input and a three-dimensional printed object, animations were created that showcased this theory. The perceived form of the object is shifted based on the geometry of light received from the projector.

To conclude the experimental research, the potential of these concepts operating within the constraints of conventional architectural methods was explored. To study the possibilities of daylight augmenting interior spaces through thresholds, the mechanics of a pinhole camera lens were exploited. This system works in two parts: a screen and a projection surface which are designed in conjunction with one another. Light becomes the operative component that acts as a catalyst to activate the system. The movement of light throughout the day changes the appearance of the space based on time. 

Using a hand-held light and a dark-box (covered by the screen), photo-sensitive paper (the projection surface) was exposed to map the augmentation of the screen geometry based on the location of the light source.

The preceding series of experiments is best summarized as explorations in perception. To architecturalize this research, spatial studies were conducted that tested geometric ideas associated with anamorphic projection and optical illusion. A simplified example of this could be described as a space that is visually impermeable, rendering itself as a wall, but in reality, is physically permeable through hidden thresholds. Formal instances of deceptive perception became the basis for the final proposal. 

As a testing ground for this illusionary architecture and the boundaries it both opens and closes, this project infiltrates Google with an architectural intervention. At the moment, their physical presence is a fortress in the urban environment of Manhattan. 111 Eighth Avenue is an art deco monolithic building encompassing an entire Manhattan block, between Eighth and Ninth Avenues, and 15th and 16th Streets. As the current NYC Google Headquarters, the building occupies the territory of technological advancement and the digital workforce. Google has an omnipresence in the digital world. They are the intermediary between the general population and the internet, but ultimately, the public doesn’t interface with them in a physical way. Super-Expose(ition) questions how and why they should open up their Manhattan campus in a way that's mutually beneficial for themselves and the public. The site and the project become the physical intermediary, while the formal spatial devices charge this intersection.

On the surface, Google is a generous benefactor of free digital tools and services, producing an egalitarian digital environment for the world. Yet in reality, Google is much more. Currently, consumers are beginning to recognize the influence of big data and its breach on their personal and political lives. However, this has always been the foundation of Google. Their business model in every sector is to create an exchange of digital tools and services for a window into the lives of users and how they can most effectively be profited off of. 

Like other silicon valley startups, Google is known for its generous employee perks. It would be foolish to think it is a result of excess capital and a laid-back working environment. It is a deliberate attempt to make their employees' labor more efficient and leisure more controlled. The company has just as much to gain by extending these perks to the public as they do to its employees.

This public experience within the Manhattan Google Headquarters functions to serve both the public and Google. While it breaks down the fortress-like nature of the building and exposes the inner workings of Google, it also provides a space for Google to test its products and interact with the public.

The proposal carves a public corridor through Google's Manhattan headquarters, bringing the public in with a series of open amenities. It is Google's way of giving back while actually taking more. A free cafe, theater, park, archive, bathhouse, and gym populate the corridor in nodes. By using basic typologies of free-time spaces in each node, the public is drawn in and the exchange between the public and Google is spatialized. By employing deceptive perception techniques along the interior avenue, the complexities of this relationship are materialized by manipulating perspective. 

The formal strategy thickens the threshold between ourselves and Google, providing layers of obscurity, surveillance, and formal misreadings. Instead of locked doors separating the two communities, this thickened space provides a visual and spatial confusion that operates at multiple scales. Both the public and Google can exploit this system.

While the public is not literally exchanging monetary currency for the use of these spaces, the information they are giving up is an exchange in itself. By architecturalizing the dynamic relationship between Google and the public, this project brings architecture into the digital age, in which nothing is free, no space is free, and no time is free.