Architecture + Brick | Sstudiomm blends Architecture with Meme Culture

TEHRAN, Iran — It’s raw, uncut Internet over at Sstudiomm. I’ve never seen an architecture/design page that so closely mirrors my day-to-day experience online. Bright vaporwave neons and a scene of Rowdy Roddy Piper shooting aliens in They Live sit alongside some of this fabulous brick cladding, a digital process the studio calls its “Negative Precision Project.”

More than that: there’s a DIY page with instructions on how to make your own. Meme culture meets architecture. From the studio (I’ve left it as-is to preserve the messageboard feel of the text):

The final prototype is a facade in Damavand, Iran. It is an independent research and parts of it comes from my MArch Thesis starting 2012 at University of Buufalo NY till 2016 TMU of Tehran.

The project is called : “NEGATIVE PRECISION.ON-SITE FABRICATION OF A PARAMETRIC BRICK FACADE//A DIY FOR ARCHITECTS”. The idea is to fight the surplus precision in order to survive with a very tight budget. It also has one big picture which u can find next door that explains the whole process of designing and building the wall in a form of a DIY.  My thesis is about precision fetishism and at some point professional DIYs as a way of thinking about open-source architecture are discussed.

“Open source architecture” isn’t a term we hear often. The studio has an open call for designers to collaborate on their own parametric facades. That page links to bricksource, which offers downloads of patterns and PDF paper stencils with the hope that the studio will one day build a gallery of submissions. It’s supported by a manifesto that’s a little difficult to parse at first, but seems directed at architectural practices in Tehran, where buildings are designed in committee by architects who never leave their offices. This creates creepy scenarios where whole neighborhoods existing in real space emerge from the ether. The DIY arm of the studio’s work seems to be a response to that.

The rolling wave-like crests of the studio’s facades, you’ll be interested to know, have parallels in videogames the designer played as a kid. I just wanted to call out this passage as a nod to a fellow geek:

A brick wall that its third dimension is or was a robotic luxury makes me think of every third dimension as a luxurious product.  As a  kid, I had to play sega 2d games in our street’s games-center as I did not have enough money for sony playstation1 as it was a new device back then. Now I see people’s lives are becoming 2d in sick suburbs or not rich areas (I live in rather a decent middle-class area which is neither luxurious nor in suburbs and still shit). Architecture that only serves the rich may not exist, may have died a long time ago, or may be dying. And as architecture has laid dying people are living a very sad life in very sad environments.

Bill Rodgers is the Managing Editor of cfile.daily.

Do you love or loathe this contemporary brick architecture project? Let us know in the comments.