massachusetts institute of technology
spring 2024
professor | mohamad nahleh

02:50 | 8.5.24
about halfway through this semester i underwent a radical shift in an attempt to sever myself from my past self. in an effort to rediscover who i am, in relation to who i was, i’ve been going out of my way to talk to people and unlock different aspects of my psyche. as a result, studio fell by the wayside for some time, and i went through the project without much thought. in fact, i started with the desire of a final outcome, to observe the shadows of clouds passing over the landscape, and have been working backwards from there ever since. consequently, i didn’t understand, or even care to understand, the project i was designing, nor the implications that arose from my impulsive design process.
this leads me to the conversation i had about a month ago that granted me an understanding of the project just a few days ago. i was talking to [redacted] about intention, about good people who do bad things and bad people whose actions inadvertently produce good things. something about desired outcomes in relation to realized actions. the naïve point i was trying to make was that good people have good intentions, and thus the sometimes negative outcomes of their actions should be forgiven, given that they didn’t mean it. [redacted] reminded me of something i had forgotten in my zealous optimism, which is simply that the majority of people who have done awful things, had good intentions. of course, good is relative here, and psychopathy and sociopathy are surely exceptions to this rule, but on the whole the statement rings true and knocked me from my pedestal of delusion, if but only for a moment.
with that being said, in my attempt to allow (force?) people to watch shadows of the clouds passing over the landscape, i designed a cult. [redacted ii] was actually the one to point this out at our midreview, and i was in a state of denial for a few weeks after. when i had finally reached a point of acceptance, i looked over my project to see i had further refined my cult, complete with trios of dwellings linked via underground tunnels centered around a communal bathroom. the aim was to bring the ground to the sky, yet looking back it's clear the project intended to bring people to their knees. to be honest, i completed the 27 drawings in order to shield my ego from the sting of failure, and the rooms themselves are nothing if not 27 cells to lock away 27 versions of myself i’d rather not confront.