Project 06, 2nd Edition Modern Construction Case Studies - Precedent: National Theatre, London designed by Denys Lasdun
Project 06: Architecture as System and Experience
Project 06 is a technology and innovation hub located within a university campus in Houston, designed to foster interdisciplinary collaboration between start-up engineering firms and academic research initiatives. The building is fundamentally organized around the act of making—the design and prototyping of large-scale assemblies, particularly vehicles and energy infrastructure components. Rather than simply accommodating these activities, the architecture internalizes them as generative forces, shaping space through processes of iteration, collaboration, and fabrication.
The building is conceived not as a singular object, but as a responsive and adaptive system—a network of interdependent spatial, social, and technical elements. Drawing on the principles of systems thinking, the architecture reflects an understanding of buildings as dynamic entities within larger ecologies of production and exchange (Meadows, 2008). The spatial configuration supports flows of knowledge and material through a sequential yet flexible progression: from conceptual design to scaled prototyping, culminating in the assembly of full-size components. This layered process is mirrored in the building’s section, where floor plates are arranged as stratified planes, referencing both geological strata and the spatial language of Lasdun’s National Theatre in London.
Bridges and circulation routes are placed obliquely, disrupting linear hierarchies and creating opportunities for informal interaction—what systems thinkers would identify as emergent behavior within a designed framework. These oblique vectors destabilize conventional spatial order, encouraging the cross-pollination of ideas and processes. The design is performative not only in its material expression but in its capacity to adapt to shifting patterns of use, embodying what Kolarevic and Malkawi (2005) describe as architecture that acts rather than merely contains.
Internally, enclosed programmatic elements are visually present as discrete forms within the open volume of the building—highlighting the labor and experimentation taking place within. Yet these forms are arranged around a series of discontinuous voids—communal pockets of shared and public space. This approach resonates with Hannah Arendt’s conception of the public realm as the space where individuals appear before others, enacting agency and plurality (Arendt, 1958). In Project 06, the discontinuous atria function as zones of both visibility and encounter, establishing architecture as a medium of political and social presence, not just utility.
At the same time, the architectural experience of the building reflects what Walter Benjamin termed the “shock” of modern experience—a fragmented, multilayered perceptual field in which the individual negotiates complex environments (Benjamin, 1936/2007). The building’s stratified composition, its multiplicity of perspectives, and its choreography of movement all mirror the phenomenology of contemporary technological life—punctuated, nonlinear, and densely mediated. The architecture thus becomes a spatial analogue to modern experience: immersive, contingent, and performative.
Through its synthesis of programmatic intensity, spatial openness, and systemic logic, Project 06 proposes a new typology—one that integrates fabrication, research, and civic life. It is a hybrid architecture operating across scales and disciplines, positioned not just as a setting for innovation but as an active participant in the production of knowledge and public culture.
References
Arendt, H. (1958). The Human Condition.
Benjamin, W. (1936). The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility.
Kolarevic, B., & Malkawi, A. M. (Eds.). (2005). Performative Architecture: Beyond Instrumentality.
Meadows, D. H. (2008). Thinking in Systems: A Primer. Chelsea Green Publishing.
Frampton, K. (1995). Studies in Tectonic Culture: The Poetics of Construction in Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Architecture.
