Thesis: Danny Jarabek

EPHEMERAL BODIES

There is a gap between our intellectual understanding of large-scale, long-term global warming and our bodily understanding of localized, short-term heat impacts. EPHEMERAL BODIES proposes a novel approach to bridge this disparity by contending with the intersectionality of escalating heat and the societal spectacle of ‘event,’ two omnipresent phenomena of global significance. In this ideological space, fact and fiction meld to suggest an iconographic fusion for reframing architecture as climate media and to reveal architecture’s symbiotic relationship between heat and the human body

Danny Jarabek
In deploying nature as a dichotomy between its power as image and its tangibility in perception, the architecture services bodily and sensory engagements through botanical and ecological interactions. The thesis envisions a wide-spanning cultural effect, an ideological paradigm shift, as a replicable endeavor designed to disassemble, adapt, and expand to the broader green infrastructure of its host cities. By accepting heat as social, cultural, and political, the proposal aims to embody coexistence, reactivate the senses, and cultivate a mode of architectural construction that celebrates the power of plants and the ephemerality of the human body.
Danny Jarabek
The first critical variable is heat. Heat is not only a defining variable of 21st-century climate conditions, but also of social politics, communication networks, and digital media infrastructures. Heat must be regarded capaciously today, not just as a measurement of a place, but rather a process in which everything participates. All matter emits heat from human skin to asphalt roads to growing plant leaves. Heat has also long been symbolically and culturally intertwined with the built environment, both as a generator of heat and as a facilitator of social gathering in spaces of thermal comfort. In recent decades coinciding with the exponential rise in global temperatures, however, the phenomenon of heat from an architectural perspective has taken on more nuanced and complicated social, political, and environmental implications. This paradigm has developed within a framework of architecture that seeks exponential precision of thermal control: the envelope as a consistent and impermeable datum between interior and exterior. Sensory neutrality, particularly in the realm of thermal sensation, has become not just the architectural default, but the ideal. In precision-managed thermal conditions, the human being has become desensitized to environmental perception. Without the opportunity for variation in our immediate stimulus, we become disassociated from nature
Danny Jarabek
The second critical variable is spectacle. Guy Deborg presents a social condition where everyday life is dominated by images and representations. He argues that in modern capitalist societies, the perception of reality is mediated by these images as symbols generated by the culture industry in entertainment, media, and advertising. People’s relationship to their reality is then molded by these images, rather than their direct experiences. Deborg’s theory of the spectacle was based on the observation that the spectacle collapsed all meanings and theories of power into the image. This thesis accepts that premise, and attempts a détournement of the spectacle itself: knowing the potency of the image, can image be instrumentalized to serve as the vehicle of engagement toward a larger goal? If nature is deployed as image as in the case of Emilio Ambasz or Theo Jansen, can actual nature recuperate the spectacle? Can the image of nature be simultaneously deployed and embodied through a complex set of meanings as well as a full set of sensory engagements?
Danny Jarabek
Danny Jarabek
The response to these questions is a kit of parts sited in Philadelphia’s Love Park that utilizes the wood frame scaffold as an architectural language. Paired to the timber scaffolding is a series of interchangeable mechanical apparatuses and vegetation substrates. Maintaining the trajectory of spectacle, the mechanics are intended to be manipulated through simple machinery by the users themselves, giving agency to the inhabitants to manipulate irrigation networks, sun shading, and wind directions. The vegetation substrates also maintain an air of iconicity and interaction through the open-door policy of taking, leaving, or exchanging plants at the user’s leisure. This creates a community dialogue between the functionality of the ecosystem and, over time, allows for the manipulations to be expressed and tracked through long-term growth patterns. These growth patterns also provide thermal consequences as vegetation density is lost or gained over time.
Danny Jarabek
The kit of parts operates at two scales: first through the assembly of modules, each of which connects to an ecological principle. Second, the modules themselves connect to each other forming a vast sensorial network with infinite moments of discovery connected by a labyrinth of local, interweaving circulation paths.
Danny Jarabek

Thesis: Danny Jarabek

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