A maneuver is a specific design move, strategy, or tactic isolated from its context and distilled down to a general concept that can be applied to multiple designs. The context could be a realized project, a discussion, or an experiment. OBSTRUCTURES// catalogs maneuvers for documentation, sharing, and future use. Please contact OBSTRUCTURES// for more information on maneuvers if you need assistance in applying them—or have questions about, or additions to, a move.

The double-slash mark constitutes a form of maneuvering by using generic textual glyphs rather than a pictographic logo. It allows OBSTRUCTURES// to absurdly skirt the fine line between having no specific logo and establishing the defined brand identity that is almost a requirement for any organization seeking to operate within the established grid of authority, spectacle, culture, society, etc. The slash is reproducible in any typeface and exists in our built environment as a sign of warning, distress, action or construction. We have simply isolated two slashes from a field of multiples in an understanding that everything we have done, or will do, is part of a whole of built objects and environments. These are all potential obstructions for those who use them now or will have to dispose of them later.

Many vegetables and fruits—and plant life in general—have the ability to grow on a vertical surface. FARMWALL proposes that an exterior layer of permeable material can be used on the façade of the building to facilitate the growth of such plants for food and shade—as well as forcing interaction or a relationship between occupant and architecture. The base of the FARMWALL system requires planter trays of various depths depending on the plant of choice. A direct relationship between this outer layer and the adjacent occupiable areas of the building is required for harvesting, watering, and general service of the façade.

The metal stud is readily available in multiple widths. Its ability to span is excellent due to a high strength-to-weight ratio and channel shape. In this maneuver the stud is freed from its prison between layers of sheathing. It is a ready-made container with multiple hanging and mounting options. Many ready-made light sources are available and fit the modularity of the metal stud. The stud may also be used for cable management and power distribution, either along walls or overhead.

The United States imports far more than it exports. Along with all of these goods comes a container; and if we do not fill them for export, they pile up and become a surplus commodity. The standardized ISO shipping container has the potential, architecturally, to provide structure and enclosure in one move.

Munitions are transported in steel containers. These containers are sized based on caliber and quantity of projectile, as well as the potential to be transported by hand if required. With the introduction of lightweight, injection-molded plastics with impact strength greater than sheet steel, these containers have flooded the surplus market. Their dimensions are suitable for the construction of furniture, space dividers and other useful objects.

With standardized spacing of notches, equal in width to the thickness of the material used, fastener-less connections can be made to create freestanding and useful objects. Appropriate tectonics can be achieved based on skill and tools available. The slots can be cut via jigsaw, band saw, or CNC tool. The performance of the object will be the same regardless of workmanship.

Space can be contained in multiple ways, and the structure of its framework can have multiple expressions. The Snake Band is a formal move that expresses edges of floor plates, major space-defining walls, or structural walls as a line on the façade—to trace characteristics of the building such as hierarchy, circulation, or program.

Free plan suggests a space without compartmentalization. Free plan implies flexibility and spatial overlap in the X and Y directions. Free section takes the same principle and applies it in the Z direction. A program works and overlaps in three dimensions by treating floor plates as ‘landings’ within a volume of space served by a central and accessible service core.

Aluminum, steel, and plastic liquid storage vessels can be flattened and applied to a wall or sloped roof as cladding. This maneuver appropriates garbage as a building material based on the existing process and technique of overlapping and applying a flat material as a shingle.

While excavating a site for the insertion of a structure, ground is disturbed and landscape is destroyed. This landscape can be replaced and programmed as a part of the new structure and re-formalized as an artificial landscape. There is no need to play conceptual games imagining that the building has risen from the landscape or should appear as if it were always there. This is a lie. The green carpet, tongue or shelf is merely the replacement of landscape lost for programmatic use or thermal mass. It can allow a building’s massing to relate to the ground in a less abrupt way—in the same way that a building should meet an existing structure or street—respectfully and with purpose.

The ‘vernacular’ of a region, place or space is not what it has always been—or what it was intended to be. It is what it is. Call a spade a spade and accept that the vernacular of the American built environment is, at best, banal—and at worst a vapid landscape that could be anywhere. Why not accept this and work with it instead of fighting it? Why must we always attempt to beautify? Maybe ugly is the new attractive, and ‘new’ can be achieved by simply viewing our monotonous and oppressive built environment through the lens of adaptation instead of condemnation.

A grid is an organizer—on paper, a city plan, or a landscape. A grid allows for order and containment of disparate stuff. Pixels make up images, and these pixels are organized on an orthogonal grid. Viewing one pixel allows for multiple associations in which an object can be seen in context to a greater whole. Program can be arranged in a pixelated fashion in the landscape or in an architectural plan. It is a form of free plan that allows multiple spaces to adjoin—and absurd programmatic relationships to form and overlap. Pixelated program is an adjacency diagram that never really becomes a plan.

Imagine a transparent façade in the public realm. It is a zone of containment for our refuse. It is simultaneously a free market for the trade and harvesting of useful garbage, but also a physical graph of both an individual household’s or institution’s waste production and effort to brandish it and make it available for re-use. Imagine a built environment where there is no garbage because everything is garbage. The world is the same, just recycled daily. All materials have an inherent use and value—or potential energy. We would never simply throw anything away. There is no ‘trash’ anymore because it now has value.