Faux real

From “kitsch” to “faux”, artificiality in architecture often suggests a lower register of design and taste and is commonly viewed negatively as cheap, tacky, inappropriate, and obvious. However, the unfettered protocols and material alchemy of such design gestures hint at the possibilities for agency in the artificial. This paper explores how the artificial re-negotiates the definition of interior and exterior and how environments of simulated “nature” use materiality, contextuality, and abstraction to generate compelling and novel experiences. The paper discusses artificiality as a design concept and speculates further, through a design project by the authors, on the potential for the artificial to amplify and distort the architectural territory of aesthetic, narrative, and craft.