Not Standard by Jun Li from usa

Architecture is designed to meet hierarchical standards: the standards of politics, the standards of regulation (zoning), and the standards of human scale, among others.

Public are living in the hierarchical spaces, where they are assumed to be a predictable standard: a standard gender, standard body, standard preference, standard activity in a certain program, standard response to a specific design.

Standard becomes an arbitrary tool for politician/ planner/ architect to assume ‘public is predictable’. However the real public are not client, not architect, not designer, not planner, not researcher, not politician.

For example: the school public is student not president, the street public is passenger not city manager, the office building public is worker not building investor. However those ignored public are used to this situation without awareness, like many other public reactions during the reign of tyranny.

This project questions these hierarchical standards by collecting 300 surveys base on the platform of Amazon Mechanical Turk. Each survey starts from questioning about the standards from human scale to architectural scale to city scale. The gradual larger scales through the different steps is the process to achieve the project objective, which is to remind the real public that they are all special individuals rather than the standard coded Modular Man.