World in a Cell

BACK

Aroussiak Gabrielian

Architectural Designer,
USC - Annenberg

Portrait photo: Aroussiak Gabrielian
Key Concepts:
The need to catalog the types of activities going on, and then embodying that narrative in a way that reveals and catalyzes the processes.
Practical Tools:
James Corner’s Fresh kills, Claude Ledoux, Downsview Airfield

Aroussiak is an architectural and landscape architectural designer with a background in visual arts. An Annenberg Fellow at the University of Southern California, Aroussiak is currently pursuing her doctorate in the Media Arts + Practice program of the USC School Cinematic Arts, where she is focused on innovative applications of new cinematic media within landscape visualization and design. Her current research utilizes expanded cinematic media to develop new ways of reading and visualizing the spatial, situational, temporal, and tactile phenomena of landscape to interpret and structure sites. As part of FOREGROUND, Aroussiak deploys design methodologies that use future scenarios as tools to better understand the present and that use design as a means of speculation.

...there's... a range from the... ‘symbolic memorial’ all the way down to the more spontaneous... memorial fence where people just consistently add more memorabilia or ephemera….. that builds up a narrative and… takes on its own life.

“[memorial symbolic] method... is so different than if you think about a cell, whose form is necessary for a specific function…. So on one level we’re talking about symbolism. On another we’re talking about a very form-specific behaviour.”

“If we detach it from where the origin was, what we've studied them as, and think about it in terms of an ecosystem, right, what can that yield?”

“Not necessarily for humans but to catalyze certain ecological processes”