Error Tactics: Designs for Disobedience

Instructor:
Location:
Completed:
Tania Tovar Torres
Houston, TX
April 2024



Exhibition Booklet



Project Description
Through the methodology of error tactics, this project investigates a hegemonic lineage of biopolitical spatial systems and proposes errant interpretations of architecture as a tenable medium for dissent. Enveloped by spatial softwares of control, the Othered body necessarily exploits standard architectonics as a venue for stray acts of ritual, refuge, and pleasure. With this, error tactics reverse the mimetic paradigm of architectural production: the digital is recast in deference to the physical. This project culminates in the construction of the makeshift machine, a contemporary device of disobedience for the pathologized body that, through its uncanny functionalism, evidences the present collapse of spatial normativity and control.

Error Tactics is part of (dis)assemblies, a public exhibition at Rice Architecture curated by Tania Tovar Torres and Zhicheng Xu.



Case Study I.
While kitchens (and the domicile) have been historically secularized for the efficient production of food, Puja Sahney documents how South Asian households in North America construct their own Hindu shrines in order to practice religious traditions within their homes. Defying the mechanics of the Frankfurt Kitchen, this scrupulously standardized space is reconfigured for ritual.



Case Study II.
In her photo series Milk Factory, Corinne May Botz lenses the various spaces in which working mothers lactate. Among them, a building manager pumps while sitting on a plastic bucket in a mechanical room, where the invisible labor of motherhood and HVAC coincide. In these unscripted scenarios, the improvisation of the maternal body is cast in opposition to capital and labor, and the very structure of the workplace.



Case Study III.
Bathrooms have long been a site of gender trouble; filtering bodies, their gender, and their genitalia. At UCLA, Eddie Gaona photographs the the bathrooms that are frequented as cruising hotspots. Homosexual sex is the unsanctioned encounter between identical genders, a consummation left unaccounted for by the heteronormative, binary production of sexed bathrooms.



Makeshift Machines
This project expands the concept of architectural software to encompass both digital and physical sites of social structuration: The rigorously standardized BIM object library, the codification of building programs, and mass-produced structures and mechanics. In these case studies, error is reified through the physical misassembly of standard matter: These makeshift machines are unruly and improvised tools that allow the biopolitical body to contest spatial normalization.



Prototype Library
I. Kitchen-Shrine
II. Mechanical-Lactation Room
III. Bathroom-Tearoom


Installation Photos

Back to topSoftware:
Rhinoceros 3D
V-Ray
Adobe Illustrator
Adobe InDesign
Special thanks:
Lauryn T.
Ayaka H.
Shivani G.
Kexuan S.
Rodrigo M. M.