obstruction 2: flip flop house

… to locate the promising marginal text, to disclose the undecidable moment, to pry it loose with the positive lever of the signifier, to reverse the resident hierarchy, only to displace it; to dismantle in order to reconstitute what is always already inscribed.

— Gayatri Chakrovorty Spivak, “Translators Preface for Of Grammatology” [lxxvii]

What is never present is always possible. What is one thing is not the other. Yes. No. Opposites attract. Likes repel each other. All of these: in complete balance. The present problem is intended to articulate the dialectical condition of things. To understand them as one rather than another. And to question: what happens if we understand them as “another” (an/other) rather than as “one”?

In language, as the semiologist Ferdinand de Saussure would state, there are only “differences without positive terms.” Each word is defined, in other words, by those which are not it. Because of this, language is a system of interconnected elements that necessitate, through comparison, the presence of all others for its meaning. As a signifying system, architecture, it can be argued, works the same way. One can further argue that during the process of design, one decision overrules another: one system, one form, one structure, etc.

What happens, then, when we question those decisions?

For the “Flip Flop House,” you are to take a list of 10 descriptive statements or adjectives of the original precedent and “invert them.” From this, you will use 5. They should be the most diverse in nature and most closely tied to what you think are the initial “design decisions” of the original precedent or the most important. So, for example, “above ground” becomes “underground”; “transparent” becomes “opaque”; “pilotis” become “load bearing walls,” “horizontal windows” become “punched out windows,” the “horizontality of the project” becomes the “verticality of the project,” etc.

Using these 5 terms as rules, design a variant of the given precedent. Keep in mind to maintain the same programmatic spaces and sizes of the original. The intention is to have the designed structure be an opposite or inversion of the original.