ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses three projects designed and fabricated by Outpost Office that reconsider relationships of form and use at the scale of interior architecture. Each project employs a strategy of ensembles – collections of objects which should be used and viewed as a collective whole rather than as individual elements. The chapter discusses how these ensembles are employed to produce open environments that invite novel modes of gathering and user improvisation. This research is informed by a reevaluation of late 1960s participatory art and its destabilizing tactics used to challenge social and civic norms. Combining low-resolution formalism, crude off-the-shelf materials and industrial-grade finishes, these projects invert typical relationships of form and use in interior architecture, a scale critical to interrogating architecture’s conventions. The chapter concludes with a reflection on how this work and its representations relate to new formats of postdigital design.
