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.