Bit By Bit

James Kubiniec (BS Arch’15)

-.

James Kubiniec is an architect based in Los Angeles at Gehry Partners, LLP. After completing his BS in Architecture at the University at Buffalo, he graduated with a MArch2 degree from The Southern California Institute of Architecture, where he was awarded the institution’s highest honor, The Gehry Prize for best graduate thesis. After, James relocated to Moscow, Russia, where he and 30 other researchers from around the world assembled into a 6-month speculative design think-tank at The Strelka Institute for Media, Architecture and Design.

Bit By Bit

Abstract and abstraction are two very different things. Both have a place in art and a significant impact on history. Abstraction has always been where you replace legible features with illegible features. This thesis does the opposite, by replacing legibility with specificity, making an oxymoron of sorts. By taking something as simple as an 8Bit arcade game character such as Megaman or Pacman, and turning its microsize and simplicity into something much more complex, something new here happens, a new representation is born.

Project Credits: The Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc). Thesis Advisor: Elena Manferdini