Sagar Ratnani

Design to [FAIL]

This thesis stands as an antithesis to architecture’s obsession with control, optimization, and perfection. It is a refusal of the rigid grid, a quiet corrosion of the ideals that promise order yet leave no room for surprise. I propose a Lab of Failure not as a place to mend what is broken, but as a stage where collapse is rehearsed, instability performed, and misalignment celebrated. It is an architecture that does not conclude, but loops constantly misfiring, recalibrating, evolving. It embraces an unseen order one born not from the clean precision of plans, but from the friction between material, tool, and force. Here, the outcome is not a fixed solution but a map of thresholds, drawn in the language of slumps, warps, and slow surrenders to gravity. 

Set against the Miesian logic of the IIT campus with its gridded certainty and restraint, the Lab of Failure becomes a deliberate contamination. Where Mies’s lines remain taut, mine fold; where his structures defy time, mine invite it in allowing weather, sag, and drift to leave their mark. 

It is both method and metaphor architecture as a body under pressure always rebalancing, never still. Its forms are not designed to last forever, but to live for a moment in flux, to register the forces that shape them to accept that nothing is truly complete. 

Ultimately, this is not a sanctuary for repair but a rehearsal for collapse. It is a place where entropy is not the enemy but the collaborator where architecture learns not to resist its own undoing, but to construct with it. 

Robot Tent Experiment teaser - https://vimeo.com/1109256269?share=copy#t=0