Ian Fennimore

Earnest Abattoir Enters Stage Right, with a limp

This thesis critically examines the role of traditionally totalizing aesthetic categories in contemporary architectural discourse. By engaging with marginal aesthetic categories—particularly zaniness, as conceptualized by Sianne Ngai—this research proposes an alternative approach that challenges the pervasive antecedental and typological thinking of architecture’s inherently introspective discourse.

Elevation view

Zaniness, characterized by its performative and equivocal nature of lightheartedness and peril, is explored as a strategic effect capable of introducing new forms of agency within architectural practice. Unlike traditionally totalizing aesthetics which prioritize exactitude and coherence, zaniness embraces intentional misfits and the productive tensions they generate, offering a means to disrupt established norms and provoke critical reflection.

Section

The architectural intervention central to this thesis is a transformation of Morphosis’ Caltrans District 7 Headquarters into an abattoir and pig sanctuary. This transformation serves as both a satirical critique and a serious interrogation of the building's canonical status, sustainable design claims, and role within the architecture. By abstracting and reconfiguring elements of the existing structure, the project exposes certain contradictions and ironies embedded in its pragmatic intentions, humorously exposing these incongruities and transforming them into a spectacle. 

Axonometry

The abattoir, a historically significant yet understated typology, is reimagined here as a site of architectural investigation that engages with broader cultural and aesthetic ideas. Marking the beginning of industrial modernism in the United States, the slaughterline is an austere mechanism of architectural and cultural production which has shaped urban development and cultural aesthetics. Drawing from work by Temple Grandin and CJ Lim, the project attempts to develop a conversation about the role of contemporary aesthetics and its ability to dismantle notions surrounding deeply ingrained cultural undercurrents of alienation and marginalization.

Facade

Postured somewhere between speculative reality and adaptive reuse, the thesis delivers an architectural project embodying the marginality of contemporary zaniness, all of its quirks and ineptitudes, its comedies and immediacy and its perverseness. By converting an introspective architectural typology into an immediate and provocative encounter with tectonic form, the project seeks to establish a different aesthetic timbre—one that embraces the trivial and the zany as conduits for meaning. In doing so, it challenges architecture to convey meanings that resonate more deeply with the overlooked, and seemingly insignificant. This intervention positions architecture not just as a reflection of grand ideals, but as a medium capable of engaging with nuanced, often contradictory conditions.

The role of traditionally totalizing aesthetic categories

Zaniness, characterized by its performative and equivocal nature of lightheartedness and peril, is explored as a strategic effect capable of introducing new forms of agency within architectural practice.