Organon was the title of a research project that I worked on while studying abroad at the Glasgow School of Art in 2012. Although I was admitted as a student of print and painting the individually directed format of the studio allowed me to experiment with a research-driven process. I eventually produced a manifesto and two house designs.

The idea of tools as a means to derive order from chaos traces to a greek word; organon. Equal in the definition were the connotations of sensory organ and thought structure. My research began to develop its own internal dogma around low technology, the merging of modern and traditional design languages, and permaculture (zero-waste gardening). There was an admiration of communal shelter from antiquity, and the manifesto engaged more and more with the overall goal of a system pertaining to a unit greater than a single person, and yet was not strongly imagined as a family structure, either.

When I returned to the united states, I applied to transfer to study architecture. The following years imposed their own microcosm of intensity and discipline, and swallowed by the spectacle of New York City, I lost sight of my original vision completely. But the critical framework of my organon research was never truly so buried. Design at one point became a sort of religion for me— representing the essential cosmology of what is humanly possible. I was driven by an interest in the real possibilities of cooperation, and the way that it could be monumentally expressed.

But finding out that the job in so many cases involves trampling some of the existing social fabric and period texture and universally abiding in the whims of the upper class left me bereft. I took some temporary solace in the artistry of drafting, both hand drawn and computer aided, but this was all unsatisfying as the realization dawned on me that I had become caught up in an idea of myself as an architect.

Originally, researching as an artist, I was subject to my own whims and explicitly defied the genealogy of architecture history and the current trade discourse, treating all things as equal in the formulation of a design language built around my niche interests like the amsterdam school and expressionist architecture. I realize now that I was working on an anti-modern project about consumption and obsolescence, but at the time I was proceeding along my own path of logic innocently.

The influence of the arts and crafts movement during my time in Scotland left me obsessed with the concept of a building being the direct footprint of the craftspeople who collectively built it. So my designs for country houses were taken partly from that tradition of William Morris; to have a cell of artisans housed together in self-sustenance, and for the building itself to feed into the loop. I was also bent on fusing divergent notions of architecture as organic and machine-like, by programming silos, wind-stacks and animal pens and bacterial digesters alongside human users as part of the positive feedback loop of shelter being proposed.

The designs pick up where the texts of utopian catalogues and self-published designs of the 1970’s— authored both by hippies and ‘paper architects' left off, with a repository of “Low technology” that makes an easy link to traditional methods and forms. The designs adapt formal language from the machine aesthetic and the usonian school, contrasting the iconography of le corbusier with frank lloyd wright and bruce goff, to evoke the complex program of the building. Traditionalism in material and construction is decoupled from form, like thatch insulation under the stucco walls of the Narkomfin building). Like a strange mirror to Le Corbusier’s admiration of the grain silo, the organon house is a sort of machine mill for living. But just like mills were very function-driven constructs of their time, the approach for a house-as-mill did not call for stylistic historicism, but rather a kind of vernacular-driven, hand-built functionalism.