Viewfinders offers a glimpse into the hard drive and bookshelf of Architecture Office. Photographs, postcards, movie clips, and screenshots—these materials act as an image archive that informs the design thinking of the office’s work. Named after a part of a camera that frames a view of a subject, the project displays a select accumulation of things that saturate the minds of the architects. Together, these images explore an architecture that is not static and singular but is inspired by the shifting identities of the things around it.
Viewfinders examines how our pervasive image-driven culture can be drawn upon to construct new designs that question the signification of a thing in relation to its place. The resulting work distinguishes forms from their assumed cultural associations. By collecting and disseminating images, Architecture Office’s work and research supports architecture’s unique capacity to simultaneously engage and refresh the things around it, rather than being static and singular.