The Boston Auction House

by De Qian Huang (MArch ’21)

This project investigates the nature of pretension in architecture, specifically when a building is in service of a pretentious image while the architecture itself is fragmented and cropped.  Designers are willful prisoners of images; their only duty is to constantly keep up the established images as janitors would a house. However,  these grandiose appearances reveal nothing other than the predicament of the ordinary.Thus, the Boston Auction House suspends the mystery of pretension, making it the motivator for the project. By doing so, we ask: does architecture have room to make the drive for the pretentious extraordinary explicit?