Double, Unified, Distorted with Preston Scott Cohen

The classical dome is not a singular object but a doubled construction: an interior surface, refined and representational, paired with an exterior shell, coarser and resistant to natural forces. Although the two are understood nominally as one thing—a dome—their unity depends upon difference and a structure that is, more often than not, concealed.Colin Rowe’s brilliant interpretation of Mies van der Rohe’s Crown Hall as, in essence, a flat dome offers a way to extend this duality into a contemporary architectural language. My work explores how architectural wholeness can be produced through the interaction of separate, and sometimes contradictory, systems rather than through their seamless integration.

The resulting architecture is neither simply unified nor fragmented. It is doubled, unified, and distorted. Its distortions are not errors or deviations from an ideal form, but consequential outcomes of the need to make this abstract conception of wholeness structurally and functionally viable and extraordinary. Architecture can remain coherent while continually revealing the tensions, forces, and differences that constitute it.