Parti Wall

Teams of Syracuse Architecture students led by faculty members worked together to develop Parti Wall, a performative installation the School’s home on campus.

Parti Wall, conceived and implemented by Assistant Professor Jonathan Louie, is a design problem and formal device for engaging mentors and students to co-develop form based design strategies, resulting in 24 hybridized walls.

The nine faculty mentors worked with their student teams to negotiate the boundaries that defined their respective spaces while working with the neighboring teams on co-construction of the walls that they shared.

Stemming from the French term prendre parti, meaning "to make a decision," the Parti is considered to be the chief organizing thought behind an architect’s design. Over the course of the 72 hours, the architectural sensibilities of the 9 mentor-led teams emerged, demonstrating the versatility that the 9-square problem; previously offered as an abstract spatial problem, a project on tectonics, and an indexing of form, and, with this project, as an infrastructure for an event.

Individual projects featured a wide range of media and materials, including videos projected onto 8 screens, to distinguish between legal/illegal surveillance imaging technologies in privacy law; projections on each wall – drawing, video, and modeling – based on the Wall Houses by John Hejduk; the domestic interior of the suburban home and its reflection through the grammatical interaction of surface, object, space using the repetition of block printed William Morris Wallpaper, a symbol of arts & crafts era domesticity; and a custom set of notched Foamcore I-beams that when interlocked together, merge into a cloud of linear forms that grow out of the cell, a formal nod to the Mie-sian corner.