Scales of Inquiry

Scales of Inquiry is an exhibition of thesis work from the Bachelor of Arts in Architectural Studies program. Featuring the work of the three streams within the program (design, history and theory, technology), the exhibition meditates on the foundational concept of scale within the design disciplines. Charles and Ray Eames’s iconic Powers of Ten films, depicting the relative scale of an atom to that of the universe, animate a common experience of scale as a seamless zoom mediated by imaging technologies such as satellites, microscopes and drones. Enlisting Anna Tsing’s meditations on nonscalability, this exhibition asks what a Powers of Ten idea of scale leaves behind? On this matter, Tsing strongly asserts how this worldview “has left ruins in its wake.” Starting from these disturbed sites, students have undertaken critical descriptions which inform their design, historical or technological strategic disruptions.
 
Including both the Larry Wayne Richards Gallery and the East Bay, Scales of Inquiry presents individual theses by scale of intervention using the categories of bodies, buildings, blocks, and boundaries. The forty-five projects included here embody these concepts, not only through their conceptual and technical focuses, but as inquiries that survey what exists and speculate on what could be, inviting and intuiting worlds beyond the one we inhabit.