The Museum of Useless Things explores alternatives in which building components, trivial as well as sophisticated ones, form constellations of irreducible objects, rejecting any clear or preconceived relations in regards to content, form, and performance. By emphasizing individual architectural elements and estranging them from their building context, through separation and rearrangement, the project calls attention to the building objects themselves, independent of their function or their subservient role within the compositional totality of the building itself.

 

Following an initial exercise on the collection of various disparate objects found on Alibaba, studying their individual qualities (profile, edge, crease, and seam) and using those qualities to blend and morph each object into each other creating new hybrid objects. These logics were extracted and then applied to the architectural elements found in the conventional building core. The museum consists of three cores with a very narrow Piranesi-like interstitial space that houses the museum’s pieces and exhibition space.

 

As each core contains a different family of circulation schemes, a formal language emerges of nooks and niches due to the odd application of architectural elements and circulation paths in which each core is comprised of. Traditionally, the building core is taken as what is typically seen as a banal uninteresting building object, and in this project, each core plays off of the relationship between access and egress and the rigid rules that govern those systems. This puts the visitor into a position of constantly entering and exiting both the cores and exhibition space, causing the visitor to spin around other kinds of circulation patterns that do not have to follow those rules, making the visitor question their orientation and perception of space within the cores and the museum itself.

 

MUSEUM OF USELESS THINGS

 

BROOKLYN, NEW YORK

UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA

CRITIC. FERDA KOLATAN

PARTNER. YUHANG HE

2015

 

SUCKERPUNCHDAILY

HYBRID OBJECTS

SECTION PERSPECTIVE

SECTION AXONOMETRIC SHOWING CIRCULATION

EXTERIOR CONTEXT + INTERIOR EXHIBITION

BUILDING SECTION

CUTAWAY AXONOMETRIC SECTION OF BUILDING CORES + CORE MASSINGS

TYPICAL FLOOR PLAN

ABOUT

 

 

JOSEPH GIAMPIETRO IS A DESIGNER LIVING AND WORKING IN NEW YORK CITY

 

JOSEPH IS A GRADUATE OF THE UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA SCHOOL OF DESIGN WITH A MASTER DEGREE IN ARCHITECTURE

 

FREELANCE PHOTOGRAPHER /

SOUND DESIGNER / AUDIO ENGINEER

HISTORY

 

 

HIRSUTA

COMPETITION TEAM

2017

 

PRATT INSTITUTE

VISITING ASSISTANT PROFESSOR - BRUCE MAU

2017 - PRESENT

 

UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA

LECTURER - ROBERT STUART-SMITH

LECTURER - GEORGINA HULJICH

2014 - PRESENT

 

DAVID JAY WEINER ARCHITECTS

JUNIOR ARCHITECT

2016 - PRESENT

 

IBANEZKIM

PHOTOGRAPHER / SOUND DESIGNER

2016

 

UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA

MASTER OF ARCHITECTURE

EMERGING DESIGN + RESEARCH CERTIFICATE

2013-2016

 

SU11 ARCHITECTURE + DESIGN

COMPETITION TEAM

2015

 

STOKES ARCHITECTURE

INTERN

2014

 

OLSAVSKY JAMINET ARCHITECTS

INTERN

2013

 

KENT STATE UNIVERSITY

COLLEGE OF ARCHITECTURE + ENVIRONMENTAL DESIGN

BACHELOR OF SCIENCE IN ARCHITECTURE

2008-2012

CONTACT

 

 

JOSEPH.M.GIAMPIETRO@GMAIL.COM

CV

© 2017 JOSEPH GIAMPIETRO