Searching for the Hyperobject: Crystals as Transscalar Vehicles

Author

Jay CostelloFollow

Date of Award

Spring 6-1-2024

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Architecture (MArch)

Department

Architecture

First Advisor

Malcom J. Rio

Second Advisor

Pablo Castillo Luna

Third Advisor

Aaron Tobey

Abstract

When I touch the street outside my house, I'm touching Los Angeles—a contiguous vector of material bisecting a continent. A slab, a stone, dust and oil, a googolplex of tightly packed anisotropic particles... At nightfall, I sneak to the edge of the highway and break off a piece. 'What does it mean for a worm to be aware of the scale of the planet?' Bruno Latour's evocative questioning of scalar jumps prompts an existentialism that places me somewhere between the hyperlocal and the massively distributed. Like a cosmic traveler floating through the universe, I feel adrift. I look around, grasping to comprehend the haunting transscalar landscapes of the Anthropocene. I stumble upon my fragment of asphalt again, but now it appears polished like a gemstone. It is both an object and a diagram. A morphology of form. A microcircuitry of polyhedral lattices and tridimensional tessellations. Auguste Bravais said, 'Crystals are the acrostics generated by the stochastics of a cage.' As I search for the Hyperobject, I hold the crystal to the light. I embody it, I peer through it, I see my reflection, and ultimately, it holds me.

Recommended Citation

Costello, Jay, "Searching for the Hyperobject: Crystals as Transscalar Vehicles" (2024). Masters Theses. 1242.
https://digitalcommons.risd.edu/masterstheses/1242

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.