Make-Believe is a public-inclusive factory located in Alphabet City, New York that automatically produces architectural follies. Each folly is constructed via a DIY model; and the client becomes the architectural designer.

Type production methods translate error into a potentially productive tool for programming and designing idiosyncratic spaces. The injection of error through human impulses and desires, as well as the investigation of random form-generation using an “alphabet” of architectural elements, projects a future that can easily manufacture dysfunction, chance, and instances of make-believe.

Situated between three disjunct neighborhoods - Alphabet City, Stuy Town, and East Village - the site is subject to intersecting parameters, defined by histories, programs, and social and environmental narratives that often contradict each other. Because of the area’s collaborative potential, the factory has an opportunity to invite competing qualities from each neighborhood and integrate them to host spatial scenarios of choice, chance, and chaos.

This disjunctive design process challenges the normative model of the architect as the sole designer. In the deconstruction of the normative design process, human decisions and desires trigger a series of effects that produce unusual aggregations open to misuse and mistakes. Happenstance relationships that arise between visitors and products can be surveyed while the causes and effects of their interactions unravel accidents, stories, and experiences throughout the factory. Through a systematic disordering of rules and relationships, and the redefinition of an antithetical architecture through mistakes and misuse (or a lack of quality control...), Make-Believe is a new vehicle for design invention and intervention.