Michelle Chang - Spring 2020 Fulfilled Symposium

As a symposium and exhibition, Fulfilled considers the role of architecture in a culture shaped by the excessive manufacture and assuagement of desire. This event examines architecture through three main themes of fulfillment: material, logistical, and cultural. Material fulfillment will explore the use of materials as elements of global capital, finite resources and aesthetic artifacts. Logistical fulfillment will present designs informed by global logistical networks and distribution environments. Cultural fulfillment will examine the architecture of desire through the proliferation of desirable objects from spoons to cities.

From political mapping and questions of labor to digital and physical storage typologies, contemporary architects are learning from and critically working within an architecture of fulfillment. Their interests and approaches span from the material and environmental shortcomings of global logistics to the formal, representational, and cultural potentials of a culture of excess. Fulfillment networks are not invisible systems, they are tangible objects—warehouses, suburban houses, parking lots, cardboard boxes, shopping malls, mechanical systems, shipping containers, etc. While many of these materials are mass produced and standardized across political contexts, their use and inevitable reuse, is culturally specific.

Fulfillment is a social, typological, formal, aesthetic, and economic practice constructed collectively through both digital and physical interactions. It is a cultural practice which evolves like a language, both universally transferable and contextually specific. This symposium aims to draw out these new arrangements, sticky relationships and material byproducts of cultural production in the age of fulfillment; and to ask once again the age-old question, “What does it mean to be fulfilled?”