Student work by Reishan McIntosh
CHASING DUST BUNNIES
Medium: Pedagogy
Workshop taught at MIT
Year: 2025
Co-instructed with Ekin Bilal
Architects often craft images that show only the most polished views and idealized spaces to define a building’s identity and spatial experience. This workshop proposes an alternative approach to image-making, one that focuses on small, fragmented views of a space in order to capture architecture’s overlooked moments. By illustrating architectural spaces at the size of 1’x1’x1’ fragments, we will get impressions of spaces that traditional architectural images would otherwise neglect—such as corners, undersides, sills, material details, traces of occupation and maintenance. In foregrounding these minor moments, the workshop invites a political reconsideration of which spaces and narratives are valued, challenging the hierarchy of architectural representation.
Student work by Nathaniel Chavez Baumberg
Each student selected an architectural space and illustrated fragments of it. Dust bunnies—the small clumps of debris that form in the corners— guided the process of identifying these fragments. Upon closer inspection, dust bunnies revealed a microcosm of their environment, as they indiscriminately collect tiny fragments from their surroundings. We speculated on the origins of the particles within the dust bunnies and illustrated the architectural fragments we imagined they may have fallen from. Through this experiment, we explored the new stories that emerge when we turn our focus to the overlooked frames that dust bunnies were born from.