Issue 05
Call, 2025
Call, 2025
Editors
Call for Submissions: Siting/Sighting
Lead Editor: Sebastian Aedo, Guest Editor: Aikaterini Antonopoulou
Lead Editor: Sebastian Aedo, Guest Editor: Aikaterini Antonopoulou
Issue 04
Prelude, 2020
Prelude, 2020
Gijs Wallis de Vries
Issue 04
Call, 2020
Call, 2020
Editors
Call for Submissions: Re-appropriation and Representation
Symposium on Architectural Research by Design
Symposium on Architectural Research by Design
Issue 03
Article, 2019
Article, 2019
Campbell Drake
The Accumulation of Cyclical Operations
The Accumulation of Cyclical Operations examines how site-specific performances can activate engagement with the spatial politics of contested Australian landscapes. It describes a series of iterative performances situated in contested spatial contexts, each centred on the semiotic potential of pianos as cultural artefacts of European origins. Emerging from the iterative project work are a series of three operations: Spatial Inversions, Instrumentalising and Spatial Tuning. Synthesised as a concluding performance within Melbourne’s decommissioned H.M. Pentridge Prison, the research offers this combined set of operations as a methodological contribution to the field of critical spatial practice, with capacity to activate new spatio-political formations and to critically engage in the spatial politics of contested landscapes.
The Accumulation of Cyclical Operations examines how site-specific performances can activate engagement with the spatial politics of contested Australian landscapes. It describes a series of iterative performances situated in contested spatial contexts, each centred on the semiotic potential of pianos as cultural artefacts of European origins. Emerging from the iterative project work are a series of three operations: Spatial Inversions, Instrumentalising and Spatial Tuning. Synthesised as a concluding performance within Melbourne’s decommissioned H.M. Pentridge Prison, the research offers this combined set of operations as a methodological contribution to the field of critical spatial practice, with capacity to activate new spatio-political formations and to critically engage in the spatial politics of contested landscapes.
Issue 03
Article, 2019
Article, 2019
Kathy Waghorn & Nick Sargent
The City as a School: An Urban Pedagogy
‘The City as a School’ describes an urban pedagogy, an approach to design teaching and research that leaves the exclusivity of the school as a space apart, and the safety of a discrete studio-based project behind, to immerse students and teachers in the contingent space of the city. It describes two exemplars of this urban pedagogy, developed at the University of Auckland; the Lab and the Event Studio. These exemplars explore the city as an assemblage, and inquiry as a performative form of pedagogy that embraces the uncertainty that such an understanding of the city-as- assemblage brings forth. Four emerging ideas are explored: hybrid research forums, shared uncertainty, material politics and fragile democratisation. Borrowed from the field of urban studies—specifically from the work of Ignatio Farías and Anders Blok—these four ideas determine the dimensions in which urban pedagogy takes place. Considering design research teaching and learning as a kind of social labour set within these determined dimensions re-contours the subjectivity of teachers, students and communities as collaborators in design research projects and, we propose, prepares students for contemporary and future forms of expanded architectural practice.
‘The City as a School’ describes an urban pedagogy, an approach to design teaching and research that leaves the exclusivity of the school as a space apart, and the safety of a discrete studio-based project behind, to immerse students and teachers in the contingent space of the city. It describes two exemplars of this urban pedagogy, developed at the University of Auckland; the Lab and the Event Studio. These exemplars explore the city as an assemblage, and inquiry as a performative form of pedagogy that embraces the uncertainty that such an understanding of the city-as- assemblage brings forth. Four emerging ideas are explored: hybrid research forums, shared uncertainty, material politics and fragile democratisation. Borrowed from the field of urban studies—specifically from the work of Ignatio Farías and Anders Blok—these four ideas determine the dimensions in which urban pedagogy takes place. Considering design research teaching and learning as a kind of social labour set within these determined dimensions re-contours the subjectivity of teachers, students and communities as collaborators in design research projects and, we propose, prepares students for contemporary and future forms of expanded architectural practice.
Issue 03
Article, 2019
Article, 2019
Jorge Valiente, Amaia Sanchez Velasco & Gonzalo Valiente
New Geographies of Violence
The work presented here narrates the creative and design research methodologies of Grandeza (in collaboration with Miguel Rodriguez-Casellas, alias Bajeza), an architectural collective that operates between the fields of spatial practice, design, cultural production and pedagogical exploration. These methodologies are described by analysing the material, discursive and representational qualities of two of their latest artworks: The Plant (2017) and Valparaiso Post-Liberal (2017). Both installations are discussed here as one-to-one scale architecture models that stage, perform, debate and challenge new geographies of violence.
Grandeza’s research and creative practice detects, denounces and challenges the transformative violence that late-capitalist practices apply over subjects, spaces and ecologies. As a collective, they started collaborating in Madrid in 2011, where they graduated together as Masters in Architecture at the Polytechnic School of Architecture (ETSAM). Since then, they have developed a cross-disciplinary practice based on collaborations with architects, collectives, artists and institutions in Madrid, Berlin and Sydney. Their work has been exhibited and published in Germany (Bauhaus Dessau in 2014); USA (1st Chicago Architecture Biennial in 2015); Australia (Mildura Arts Centre in 2016, Wagga Wagga Art Gallery in 2017, and in 2018 at the Bank Art Museum Moree, Tin Sheds Gallery, and Australian Design Centre); Chile (XX Chilean Biennial of Architecture and Urbanism in 2017); Spain (Madrid and Santander, at the XIV Spanish Biennial of Architecture and Urbanism in 2018); and Italy (XXII Milano Triennale, in 2019). Since mid-2017, the Grandeza members have been collaborating with Miguel Rodriguez-Casellas (alias Bajeza) thus forming the architectural ménage à quatre Grandeza/Bajeza. They share a commitment to linking pedagogy, research, critical thinking, and creative practice as complementary tools for political emancipation. Their most recent project, Teatro Della Terra Alienata, was the Australian pavilion at the XXII Triennale di Milano, which received the Golden Bee Award for the best national pavilion.
The work presented here narrates the creative and design research methodologies of Grandeza (in collaboration with Miguel Rodriguez-Casellas, alias Bajeza), an architectural collective that operates between the fields of spatial practice, design, cultural production and pedagogical exploration. These methodologies are described by analysing the material, discursive and representational qualities of two of their latest artworks: The Plant (2017) and Valparaiso Post-Liberal (2017). Both installations are discussed here as one-to-one scale architecture models that stage, perform, debate and challenge new geographies of violence.
Grandeza’s research and creative practice detects, denounces and challenges the transformative violence that late-capitalist practices apply over subjects, spaces and ecologies. As a collective, they started collaborating in Madrid in 2011, where they graduated together as Masters in Architecture at the Polytechnic School of Architecture (ETSAM). Since then, they have developed a cross-disciplinary practice based on collaborations with architects, collectives, artists and institutions in Madrid, Berlin and Sydney. Their work has been exhibited and published in Germany (Bauhaus Dessau in 2014); USA (1st Chicago Architecture Biennial in 2015); Australia (Mildura Arts Centre in 2016, Wagga Wagga Art Gallery in 2017, and in 2018 at the Bank Art Museum Moree, Tin Sheds Gallery, and Australian Design Centre); Chile (XX Chilean Biennial of Architecture and Urbanism in 2017); Spain (Madrid and Santander, at the XIV Spanish Biennial of Architecture and Urbanism in 2018); and Italy (XXII Milano Triennale, in 2019). Since mid-2017, the Grandeza members have been collaborating with Miguel Rodriguez-Casellas (alias Bajeza) thus forming the architectural ménage à quatre Grandeza/Bajeza. They share a commitment to linking pedagogy, research, critical thinking, and creative practice as complementary tools for political emancipation. Their most recent project, Teatro Della Terra Alienata, was the Australian pavilion at the XXII Triennale di Milano, which received the Golden Bee Award for the best national pavilion.
Issue 03
Article, 2019
Article, 2019
Urs Bette
Unreasonable Creatures: Architecture and (Bad) Behaviour
Unreasonable Creatures: Architecture & (Bad) Behaviour presents an investigation into the epistemological processes of (an) architectural practice; both a practice (a firm) and practice (a way of working). It presents these processes not by explication, but by a staging of one of the key concerns with which that practice engages, the unreasonable; that which cannot be reduced to reason. This presentation operates through two similar but distinct modes: an openly navigable Prezi (online), and a matrix of projects arranged in the form of a document; both might be thought of as maps. In the former, the extended plane of the Prezi interface offers a surface through which the work can be navigated. The lack of orientation (signage) here is deliberate, encouraging a wandering through image and text fragments, allowing an unpicking through zooming, panning and scanning of moments within the field; the pre- formatted presentation sequence provides just one staged ‘passage’ through this field. The latter, the matrix, stages a similar wandering, but is aware of the limits of digital zoom and resolution; it presents material in a manner that intentionally equates text and image and explores their respective (il)legibilities.
Both underlying ‘maps’ (field and matrix) are composed of extracts from the author’s PhD thesis, earlier texts, and project images. Their arrangement is based on the interplay of these different modes as visual content, accepting that parts of the text act as supplementary fallout. The text passages within do not constitute a continuous text to be read as a whole, but rather stage intersections and oppositions between the modes of image and text. The overlap of discarded, cut and edited texts reveals (visually) those phrases, thoughts, insights that persist. Pieces are identified, relationships traced, and connections made by a revelation through overlapping and juxtaposing imagings. Visuality (imaging) leads reasoning.
This revelation through forms of visuality enacts one of the core concerns developed through the projects documented within, namely: how to provoke the emergence of novel types of space through the staged opposition between conditions, be it the architectural object and its ground, cognition and analytic synthesis in the design act, or—as in this case—between text and image. In these oppositions there is a necessary engagement with ‘unreasonable’ thought or behaviours. The projects contained within develop an approach to architectural design in which these oppositions (confrontations) and the unreasonable are understood as constructive pathways towards developing the performative potential of design, to inform the site- related production of architectural character and space.
Unreasonable Creatures: Architecture & (Bad) Behaviour presents an investigation into the epistemological processes of (an) architectural practice; both a practice (a firm) and practice (a way of working). It presents these processes not by explication, but by a staging of one of the key concerns with which that practice engages, the unreasonable; that which cannot be reduced to reason. This presentation operates through two similar but distinct modes: an openly navigable Prezi (online), and a matrix of projects arranged in the form of a document; both might be thought of as maps. In the former, the extended plane of the Prezi interface offers a surface through which the work can be navigated. The lack of orientation (signage) here is deliberate, encouraging a wandering through image and text fragments, allowing an unpicking through zooming, panning and scanning of moments within the field; the pre- formatted presentation sequence provides just one staged ‘passage’ through this field. The latter, the matrix, stages a similar wandering, but is aware of the limits of digital zoom and resolution; it presents material in a manner that intentionally equates text and image and explores their respective (il)legibilities.
Both underlying ‘maps’ (field and matrix) are composed of extracts from the author’s PhD thesis, earlier texts, and project images. Their arrangement is based on the interplay of these different modes as visual content, accepting that parts of the text act as supplementary fallout. The text passages within do not constitute a continuous text to be read as a whole, but rather stage intersections and oppositions between the modes of image and text. The overlap of discarded, cut and edited texts reveals (visually) those phrases, thoughts, insights that persist. Pieces are identified, relationships traced, and connections made by a revelation through overlapping and juxtaposing imagings. Visuality (imaging) leads reasoning.
This revelation through forms of visuality enacts one of the core concerns developed through the projects documented within, namely: how to provoke the emergence of novel types of space through the staged opposition between conditions, be it the architectural object and its ground, cognition and analytic synthesis in the design act, or—as in this case—between text and image. In these oppositions there is a necessary engagement with ‘unreasonable’ thought or behaviours. The projects contained within develop an approach to architectural design in which these oppositions (confrontations) and the unreasonable are understood as constructive pathways towards developing the performative potential of design, to inform the site- related production of architectural character and space.
Issue 03
Article, 2019
Article, 2019
Erik L’Heureux
Hot and Wet: Architectures of the Equator
The legacy of a temperate hegemony continues to influence how the tropical is perceived: largely as an exotic paradise or pestilence-ridden landscape. Architectural discourse has long deemed the equator a condition to be tempered; an atmospheric problem that requires a temperate fix. Contemporary architectural responses that centre on performance and efficiency improvements continue to purvey these prejudices as a foundation of their discourse, or, simply, to import temperate strategies as an atmospheric replacement to the equatorial. The work documented here investigates a theory of spatial depth and climatic gradient as key to developing buildings for the rapidly densifying urban equator. Through various architectural strategies—loosely categorized as deep envelopes—the core ingredients of space, material depth, and solidity are employed to produce architectural and atmospheric calibrations specific to the hot and wet equatorial city. Four architectural precedents traced from the 1930’s to the 1970’s demonstrate a range of architectural approaches that inform the author’s contemporary design practice. The knowledge gained through the precedents is then realised through four contemporary projects based in Singapore. In doing so, the work presented here seeks to expand the discourse on equatorial architecture, by returning agency to architectural practice via expressive and atmospheric formal languages and techniques relevant to the hot and wet equator.
The legacy of a temperate hegemony continues to influence how the tropical is perceived: largely as an exotic paradise or pestilence-ridden landscape. Architectural discourse has long deemed the equator a condition to be tempered; an atmospheric problem that requires a temperate fix. Contemporary architectural responses that centre on performance and efficiency improvements continue to purvey these prejudices as a foundation of their discourse, or, simply, to import temperate strategies as an atmospheric replacement to the equatorial. The work documented here investigates a theory of spatial depth and climatic gradient as key to developing buildings for the rapidly densifying urban equator. Through various architectural strategies—loosely categorized as deep envelopes—the core ingredients of space, material depth, and solidity are employed to produce architectural and atmospheric calibrations specific to the hot and wet equatorial city. Four architectural precedents traced from the 1930’s to the 1970’s demonstrate a range of architectural approaches that inform the author’s contemporary design practice. The knowledge gained through the precedents is then realised through four contemporary projects based in Singapore. In doing so, the work presented here seeks to expand the discourse on equatorial architecture, by returning agency to architectural practice via expressive and atmospheric formal languages and techniques relevant to the hot and wet equator.
Issue 03
Article, 2019
Article, 2019
Chuan Khoo
Finding Byaduk: Field Notes
The Finding Byaduk creative residency is an exploratory process aimed at producing speculations into the phenomenology of digital data representations of a landscape, and the design of interfaces and expressions to embody said representations. Part of this process is inspired by design ethnography, and the consideration of how its methodologies articulate a picture of the site in question. The creative brief centred around a thought experiment on ‘affective telepresence’, finding means to remotely convey the qualities of a place using environmental sensors, digital connected technologies, and the design of embodied expressions and/or interactions. Finding Byaduk: Field Notes covers the formative and supporting phases of this project, focusing on capturing ethnographic observations of the town, and connecting these to the eventual production of artefacts as a response to the written, visual and audio recordings of Byaduk.
I would like to acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land of the Gunditjmara peoples on which this project took place, and pay my respects to the Elders past, present and future.
The Finding Byaduk creative residency is an exploratory process aimed at producing speculations into the phenomenology of digital data representations of a landscape, and the design of interfaces and expressions to embody said representations. Part of this process is inspired by design ethnography, and the consideration of how its methodologies articulate a picture of the site in question. The creative brief centred around a thought experiment on ‘affective telepresence’, finding means to remotely convey the qualities of a place using environmental sensors, digital connected technologies, and the design of embodied expressions and/or interactions. Finding Byaduk: Field Notes covers the formative and supporting phases of this project, focusing on capturing ethnographic observations of the town, and connecting these to the eventual production of artefacts as a response to the written, visual and audio recordings of Byaduk.
I would like to acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land of the Gunditjmara peoples on which this project took place, and pay my respects to the Elders past, present and future.
Issue 03
Article, 2019
Article, 2019
Ainslie Murray
Utterances of Everyday Life
Everyday Life calls attention to the movements and resulting interactions that develop from the habitual patterns of daily life; those movements that, through their regularity, become invisible. In this practice-led work, airflows within and around a pair of dancers were visualised as these dancers enacted a series of improvised everyday movements. The visualisations drew attention to air as a sensitised and complex three-dimensional field of influence that bristles with potential. Presented as twinned imagings, two types of footage contrast alternative approaches to the visualisation of air, and as the figures move within the imagings we focus not on their movement or their absent bodies, but on the wake of their passage made visible as restless whorls and lineations.
Architectural space is shown to be agitated—stirred and concocted by the body—where inhabitants actively generate ‘architecture’ through their movement and reframe architectural design as a participatory endeavour where all bodies, simply by virtue of their movement in the medium of air, are actively generating form. Everyday Life raises multiple questions, all brought together in a non- linear relationship of varied parts. In resisting a polarised framework of question and answer, this work instead aims to open the possibility of a grafted practice that might prick the architectural conscience and, perhaps, expand it.
Everyday Life calls attention to the movements and resulting interactions that develop from the habitual patterns of daily life; those movements that, through their regularity, become invisible. In this practice-led work, airflows within and around a pair of dancers were visualised as these dancers enacted a series of improvised everyday movements. The visualisations drew attention to air as a sensitised and complex three-dimensional field of influence that bristles with potential. Presented as twinned imagings, two types of footage contrast alternative approaches to the visualisation of air, and as the figures move within the imagings we focus not on their movement or their absent bodies, but on the wake of their passage made visible as restless whorls and lineations.
Architectural space is shown to be agitated—stirred and concocted by the body—where inhabitants actively generate ‘architecture’ through their movement and reframe architectural design as a participatory endeavour where all bodies, simply by virtue of their movement in the medium of air, are actively generating form. Everyday Life raises multiple questions, all brought together in a non- linear relationship of varied parts. In resisting a polarised framework of question and answer, this work instead aims to open the possibility of a grafted practice that might prick the architectural conscience and, perhaps, expand it.
Issue 03
Article, 2019
Article, 2019
Simon Twose, Jules Moloney & Lawrence Harvey
Canyon
Canyon is an experimental design process that extends ideation through drawing via a novel hybrid of hand sketches, soundscapes and virtual reality (VR). The inspiration for the project is the dynamic undersea landscape of Kaikōura Canyon, Aotearoa, New Zealand. The experiment draws atmospheric qualities from the unseen topography and vast body of water of the canyon, recently jolted by huge forces in the 2016 Kaikōura earthquake. The ominous scale and power of this submarine landscape is distilled through multi-modal architectural drawing, merging presences within drawing with those in landscape.
The early phases of the Canyon project located a mixed media installation in the Palazzo Bembo for the XVI Venice Biennale. This paper reflects on the capacity for drawing to observe and record intangible presences, augmented by the affordance of VR and spatial soundscapes. Canyon also opens up a critique of the traditional view of landscape and its relation to architecture. It alludes to alternative ways in which landscape and architecture might intersect, drawing instead from landscape’s intangible, scalar and material presence. The unseen marine canyon landscape is used as a virtual poetic site to provoke and test drawing and experiential techniques; drawing is expanded as a hybrid medium, able to research architectural presences through multiple platforms.
Canyon is an experimental design process that extends ideation through drawing via a novel hybrid of hand sketches, soundscapes and virtual reality (VR). The inspiration for the project is the dynamic undersea landscape of Kaikōura Canyon, Aotearoa, New Zealand. The experiment draws atmospheric qualities from the unseen topography and vast body of water of the canyon, recently jolted by huge forces in the 2016 Kaikōura earthquake. The ominous scale and power of this submarine landscape is distilled through multi-modal architectural drawing, merging presences within drawing with those in landscape.
The early phases of the Canyon project located a mixed media installation in the Palazzo Bembo for the XVI Venice Biennale. This paper reflects on the capacity for drawing to observe and record intangible presences, augmented by the affordance of VR and spatial soundscapes. Canyon also opens up a critique of the traditional view of landscape and its relation to architecture. It alludes to alternative ways in which landscape and architecture might intersect, drawing instead from landscape’s intangible, scalar and material presence. The unseen marine canyon landscape is used as a virtual poetic site to provoke and test drawing and experiential techniques; drawing is expanded as a hybrid medium, able to research architectural presences through multiple platforms.
Issue 03
Article, 2019
Article, 2019
Rachel Hurst
Megalomaniacal Plans: Exploiting Time and Transparency
If there is one drawing indispensable to the description and production of architecture it is the plan. As it slices through space and substance, it allows us to describe and communicate the partis, construction and circulation of a building, all with the benefit of a bird’s-eye, or God-like elevated view that confirms our architectural authority over the design. As the preeminent tool to conceive and construct architecture, the plan has evolved highly codified techniques of representation, including the superimposition of transparent layers of drawings to show alternative arrangements, additional storeys, reflected surfaces or site conditions. Superimposition thus allows an extrusion from two- into three-dimensions. This paper explores how this tactic of superimposition can also operate as an extrusion into the fourth dimension of time, to reveal insights into the histories of both drawings and buildings.
Three projects support this premise, described in intertwining, parallel texts of theory and practice, and in an accompanying gallery of images. Contextualised against Eisenman’s defining use of ‘superpositioning’, and Rossi’s analogical collages, the projects align with contemporary drawing-thinking practices of polyvalency and indeterminism. They develop a practice of using archival plans as a primary source for research and creative speculation. The resulting works explore three concepts: the conventions and possible future of analogue architectural representation; the use of the archive for speculative practices; and the use of speculative practices to construct new knowledge.
If there is one drawing indispensable to the description and production of architecture it is the plan. As it slices through space and substance, it allows us to describe and communicate the partis, construction and circulation of a building, all with the benefit of a bird’s-eye, or God-like elevated view that confirms our architectural authority over the design. As the preeminent tool to conceive and construct architecture, the plan has evolved highly codified techniques of representation, including the superimposition of transparent layers of drawings to show alternative arrangements, additional storeys, reflected surfaces or site conditions. Superimposition thus allows an extrusion from two- into three-dimensions. This paper explores how this tactic of superimposition can also operate as an extrusion into the fourth dimension of time, to reveal insights into the histories of both drawings and buildings.
Three projects support this premise, described in intertwining, parallel texts of theory and practice, and in an accompanying gallery of images. Contextualised against Eisenman’s defining use of ‘superpositioning’, and Rossi’s analogical collages, the projects align with contemporary drawing-thinking practices of polyvalency and indeterminism. They develop a practice of using archival plans as a primary source for research and creative speculation. The resulting works explore three concepts: the conventions and possible future of analogue architectural representation; the use of the archive for speculative practices; and the use of speculative practices to construct new knowledge.
Issue 03
Prologue, 2019
Prologue, 2019
Dorian Wiszniewski & Chris French
Issue 02
Article, 2018
Article, 2018
Thi Phuong-Trâm Nguyen
Delineating Surfaces
This paper retraces the explorations engaged in by the Minim friar Jean-François Niceron (1613-1646). His treatise, La Perspective curieuse, recounts his search for anamorphic images and suggests the pursuit of ‘delight in seeing the possibilities beyond the expected’ that these images offer. Anamorphic representations are deformed images, whereby the point of view is displaced in space. As a result, the resolution of the image is only possible through the adjustment of the body, the re-positioning of the body near that unique secondary vantage point. Based on the capacity of anamorphic representations to disclose a space for wonder manifested only in the physical encounter with the image, the following text presents a workshop undertaken with PhD students where we re-enacted Niceron’s drawing instructions to explore the significance of ‘reaching toward a meaning not yet known’ that he envisioned.
Through the workshop, the act of delineating a surface became a way to occupy and inhabit the space. The text is presented in the format of a script to allow readers to follow the events that happened during the workshop, but also to encourage rehearsal and to invite the event to be played again. The script, as well as Niceron’s drawing instructions, are meant to be read, played and repeated, in the same way the movement by a body is a prerequisite for uncovering the meaning of the anamorphic image. These re-enactments do not only possess the potential to bring the past into the present, but they also—by the act of imagining a past-in- the-present—project our understanding of history into possible futures.
This paper retraces the explorations engaged in by the Minim friar Jean-François Niceron (1613-1646). His treatise, La Perspective curieuse, recounts his search for anamorphic images and suggests the pursuit of ‘delight in seeing the possibilities beyond the expected’ that these images offer. Anamorphic representations are deformed images, whereby the point of view is displaced in space. As a result, the resolution of the image is only possible through the adjustment of the body, the re-positioning of the body near that unique secondary vantage point. Based on the capacity of anamorphic representations to disclose a space for wonder manifested only in the physical encounter with the image, the following text presents a workshop undertaken with PhD students where we re-enacted Niceron’s drawing instructions to explore the significance of ‘reaching toward a meaning not yet known’ that he envisioned.
Through the workshop, the act of delineating a surface became a way to occupy and inhabit the space. The text is presented in the format of a script to allow readers to follow the events that happened during the workshop, but also to encourage rehearsal and to invite the event to be played again. The script, as well as Niceron’s drawing instructions, are meant to be read, played and repeated, in the same way the movement by a body is a prerequisite for uncovering the meaning of the anamorphic image. These re-enactments do not only possess the potential to bring the past into the present, but they also—by the act of imagining a past-in- the-present—project our understanding of history into possible futures.
Issue 02
Article, 2018
Article, 2018
Samantha Krukowski & Peter Goché
Parallel Projections
Parallel Projections investigates two types of post- industrial site: the architectural and the agricultural; it conflates (projections of and into) spaces as means of making visceral our intellectual comprehension of the relationships between materiality, surface, place and history. Parallel Projections is not meant for specific places but for specific kinds of spaces: defunct industrial buildings, abandoned urban edifices, and mechanized natural landscapes. The authors, living in places (Iowa and Ohio) that have both been radically altered by scalar economic shifts, adapt alien (guest) project components to their native (host) contexts. Both types of spaces, host and guest, as spaces of urban and rural abandonment, share surfaces that are compelling palimpsests. These surfaces are encrusted with nearly-obliterated histories, emptied by changes in production methods and habits of occupation and revealed by ghost texts. In opposition to the idea that these sites should be whitewashed and redrawn, the authors see them as grounds for new layers that can receive projections of phenomena from other post- industrial sites and as repositories for material evidence that deepens, rather than erases, the evidence of their pasts.
Parallel Projections investigates two types of post- industrial site: the architectural and the agricultural; it conflates (projections of and into) spaces as means of making visceral our intellectual comprehension of the relationships between materiality, surface, place and history. Parallel Projections is not meant for specific places but for specific kinds of spaces: defunct industrial buildings, abandoned urban edifices, and mechanized natural landscapes. The authors, living in places (Iowa and Ohio) that have both been radically altered by scalar economic shifts, adapt alien (guest) project components to their native (host) contexts. Both types of spaces, host and guest, as spaces of urban and rural abandonment, share surfaces that are compelling palimpsests. These surfaces are encrusted with nearly-obliterated histories, emptied by changes in production methods and habits of occupation and revealed by ghost texts. In opposition to the idea that these sites should be whitewashed and redrawn, the authors see them as grounds for new layers that can receive projections of phenomena from other post- industrial sites and as repositories for material evidence that deepens, rather than erases, the evidence of their pasts.
Issue 02
Article, 2018
Article, 2018
Michael Davis
Material Openings: Ark and the Materiality of the Vessel
If an installation is charged with immersing an audience simultaneously in the alternative worlds to which it gestures, what role might the materiality of the installation play in the transposition of time and space implicit in such an immersion? The vehicle for an investigation into this affective materiality is a reflective case study of ‘the Vessel’ and its making.
Presented, originally, as part of a PhD by Project at RMIT, Melbourne, The Vessel allowed the telling of a story of my architectural practice, Ark. Having been exposed to the Dutch Rationalism of the late 1990’s and early 2000’s, and subsequently immersed in the formalism of the AADRL, Ark was eventually returned to New Zealand and the particular lineage of modernist tectonics from which it stems. Through the apparatus of The Vessel. The research showed how Ark brought these different approaches to architectural making together to the effect of creating new architectural works.
The article focuses on The Vessel itself through the lens of materiality. Doing so relocates The Vessel to new territory where it can open new, alternative design research opportunities.
If an installation is charged with immersing an audience simultaneously in the alternative worlds to which it gestures, what role might the materiality of the installation play in the transposition of time and space implicit in such an immersion? The vehicle for an investigation into this affective materiality is a reflective case study of ‘the Vessel’ and its making.
Presented, originally, as part of a PhD by Project at RMIT, Melbourne, The Vessel allowed the telling of a story of my architectural practice, Ark. Having been exposed to the Dutch Rationalism of the late 1990’s and early 2000’s, and subsequently immersed in the formalism of the AADRL, Ark was eventually returned to New Zealand and the particular lineage of modernist tectonics from which it stems. Through the apparatus of The Vessel. The research showed how Ark brought these different approaches to architectural making together to the effect of creating new architectural works.
The article focuses on The Vessel itself through the lens of materiality. Doing so relocates The Vessel to new territory where it can open new, alternative design research opportunities.
Issue 02
Article, 2018
Article, 2018
Miguel Paredes Maldonado
Anexact but Rigorous: The Territorial Delimitations of Sejima and Nishizawa
Anexact but Rigorous offers an analytical redrawing of the plans of a series of recent projects by Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa. It describes generative geometrical operations common to these projects and, in turn, articulates a set of recurring formal families that characterises their work. Far from being ‘doodles’, these formal families constitute rigorously defined boundaries: they install themselves into space as closed, regional subsets of extended territorial surfaces that are incarnated in both the surface of the paper and the surface of the land. This closer inspection of Sejima and Nishizawa’s practices of territorial drawing reveals an underlying tension between Euclidean and non-Euclidean sensibilities, which, tapping into Derrida’s re-reading of Edmund Husserl’s The Origin of Geometry, can best be described as ‘anexact’. On the one hand, drawing is used to delimitate a region of the physical territory with extreme exactitude. On the other hand, the same delimitating operation articulates continuous closed curves, which in turn describe boundaries whose shapes cannot be defined through abstract, idealised geometries (i.e. circles, arcs or squares). With this productive tension in mind, the textual component of this contribution interrogates the development, intentions and outcomes of the aforementioned operations, using the theoretical writings of Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky (primarily concerning the nature of line and its spatial value) as its main supporting scaffold. In addition to this, the proposed contribution will speculate on the possibility of a hybrid practice of drawing that situates itself between the Euclidean and the non-Euclidean. In this speculation, Sejima and Nishizawa’s geometrical constructs are discussed through Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of ‘territory’, positing them as modes of spatial demarcation that are simultaneously anexact and rigorous.
Anexact but Rigorous offers an analytical redrawing of the plans of a series of recent projects by Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa. It describes generative geometrical operations common to these projects and, in turn, articulates a set of recurring formal families that characterises their work. Far from being ‘doodles’, these formal families constitute rigorously defined boundaries: they install themselves into space as closed, regional subsets of extended territorial surfaces that are incarnated in both the surface of the paper and the surface of the land. This closer inspection of Sejima and Nishizawa’s practices of territorial drawing reveals an underlying tension between Euclidean and non-Euclidean sensibilities, which, tapping into Derrida’s re-reading of Edmund Husserl’s The Origin of Geometry, can best be described as ‘anexact’. On the one hand, drawing is used to delimitate a region of the physical territory with extreme exactitude. On the other hand, the same delimitating operation articulates continuous closed curves, which in turn describe boundaries whose shapes cannot be defined through abstract, idealised geometries (i.e. circles, arcs or squares). With this productive tension in mind, the textual component of this contribution interrogates the development, intentions and outcomes of the aforementioned operations, using the theoretical writings of Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky (primarily concerning the nature of line and its spatial value) as its main supporting scaffold. In addition to this, the proposed contribution will speculate on the possibility of a hybrid practice of drawing that situates itself between the Euclidean and the non-Euclidean. In this speculation, Sejima and Nishizawa’s geometrical constructs are discussed through Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of ‘territory’, positing them as modes of spatial demarcation that are simultaneously anexact and rigorous.
Issue 02
Article, 2018
Article, 2018
Peter Goché
Surfaceworks “Out There” In Here: Surface Tension and Spatial Appartus
Black Contemporary is an experiential archive whereby ongoing investigations are conducted in an effort to expand knowledge specific to the study of atmospheric logics and the Midwestern agricultural landscape. The archive is located two miles south of Ames, Iowa. Using experiential perceptions as spatial conditioners, current studio projects focus on the act of making and curating a series of Surface Works within a dormant seed-drying facility constructed in 1979. Based on a series of modulated experimental actions, the foundational body of work provides a material/ visual reflection on the contemporary social configuration of the post-industrial landscape of Iowa. This work might best be understood as a peculiar deposit of site-adjusted installations and experimental drawings that indicate the presence of, and makes clearly recognizable, its context as referent, rather than as a source or setting. Each work is driven by the nascent possibility of a persistent desire to intercourse with existing material surroundings pursuant to a philosophical position that leverages perceptual notions of chiaroscuro in the practice of understanding and generating a set of spatial valence within the material culture of a post-industrial site. Surface Works addresses the aesthetic experience generated by a set of spatial apparatus (installation and experimental drawing) with a relative capacity to draw out, unite, react or interact with the latent dimensions of our inherited landscape.
Black Contemporary is an experiential archive whereby ongoing investigations are conducted in an effort to expand knowledge specific to the study of atmospheric logics and the Midwestern agricultural landscape. The archive is located two miles south of Ames, Iowa. Using experiential perceptions as spatial conditioners, current studio projects focus on the act of making and curating a series of Surface Works within a dormant seed-drying facility constructed in 1979. Based on a series of modulated experimental actions, the foundational body of work provides a material/ visual reflection on the contemporary social configuration of the post-industrial landscape of Iowa. This work might best be understood as a peculiar deposit of site-adjusted installations and experimental drawings that indicate the presence of, and makes clearly recognizable, its context as referent, rather than as a source or setting. Each work is driven by the nascent possibility of a persistent desire to intercourse with existing material surroundings pursuant to a philosophical position that leverages perceptual notions of chiaroscuro in the practice of understanding and generating a set of spatial valence within the material culture of a post-industrial site. Surface Works addresses the aesthetic experience generated by a set of spatial apparatus (installation and experimental drawing) with a relative capacity to draw out, unite, react or interact with the latent dimensions of our inherited landscape.
Issue 02
Article, 2018
Article, 2018
Cameron McEwan
The Analogical Surface: City, Drawing, Form, and Thought
This paper, and its accompanying suite of drawings and montages, approaches surface through Aldo Rossi’s notion of the analogical city. It does so in three ways: firstly, as the surface of the city, secondly as the surface of the drawing, and third as the analogical surface of thought between city and drawing. The first surface emphasises plan-based representation centred on an analytical gaze looking from above or outside to the city as a whole. The second is a quasi-perspectival and frontal surface with the analytical gaze looking at the city from the inside. The third surface is the conceptual hinge between those two positions. Through these three readings of surface I will discuss analogical strategies of formal, representational and disciplinary critique (including critique of scale, situation, form, space, figure and ground). I will discuss how the process of the critical removal of form creates an analogical space for projective possibility, and how the accumulation of form amounts to an erasure of form in Rossi’s work. The accompanying drawings and montages operate specifically in dialogue with Rossi’s analogical city, but function more broadly as a move toward developing the formal knowledge of architecture as a cultural and critical project.
This paper, and its accompanying suite of drawings and montages, approaches surface through Aldo Rossi’s notion of the analogical city. It does so in three ways: firstly, as the surface of the city, secondly as the surface of the drawing, and third as the analogical surface of thought between city and drawing. The first surface emphasises plan-based representation centred on an analytical gaze looking from above or outside to the city as a whole. The second is a quasi-perspectival and frontal surface with the analytical gaze looking at the city from the inside. The third surface is the conceptual hinge between those two positions. Through these three readings of surface I will discuss analogical strategies of formal, representational and disciplinary critique (including critique of scale, situation, form, space, figure and ground). I will discuss how the process of the critical removal of form creates an analogical space for projective possibility, and how the accumulation of form amounts to an erasure of form in Rossi’s work. The accompanying drawings and montages operate specifically in dialogue with Rossi’s analogical city, but function more broadly as a move toward developing the formal knowledge of architecture as a cultural and critical project.
Issue 02
Article, 2018
Article, 2018
Timothy Burke
Exhibitionist Drawing Machines
Drawing, as both an object and an action, involves an entanglement of an author, the surface of their work and the space that the work occupies (both the space of production and the space of presentation). However, this entanglement between the drawer and the drawing is problematised by the mechanisation of the drawing process. If drawings are produced by machines, how does this relationship change? What new drawings emerge? What part does an author play in the drawing and how much are they implicated in the drawing that is produced? This article explores this question through the design-led research project Exquisite Drawing Machines, which involves making machines that make drawings.
This research is conducted by playing the surrealist game of the exquisite corpse with fifteen spring-wound drawing machines. One of the difficulties that arises from this research is how to mediate the role of the drawn surfaces of the exquisite corpses, the installation of the Exquisite Drawing Machines as objects-in-themselves, and the temporal-spatial event of play. I will explicate the relationship of these three modes and examine how these drawing machines and other strategies of automatism might surface qualities of the unexpected in the production of drawings.
Drawing, as both an object and an action, involves an entanglement of an author, the surface of their work and the space that the work occupies (both the space of production and the space of presentation). However, this entanglement between the drawer and the drawing is problematised by the mechanisation of the drawing process. If drawings are produced by machines, how does this relationship change? What new drawings emerge? What part does an author play in the drawing and how much are they implicated in the drawing that is produced? This article explores this question through the design-led research project Exquisite Drawing Machines, which involves making machines that make drawings.
This research is conducted by playing the surrealist game of the exquisite corpse with fifteen spring-wound drawing machines. One of the difficulties that arises from this research is how to mediate the role of the drawn surfaces of the exquisite corpses, the installation of the Exquisite Drawing Machines as objects-in-themselves, and the temporal-spatial event of play. I will explicate the relationship of these three modes and examine how these drawing machines and other strategies of automatism might surface qualities of the unexpected in the production of drawings.
Issue 02
Prelude, 2018
Prelude, 2018
Alexander Brodsky, Mark Dorrian & Richard Anderson
Issue 01
Article, 2015
Article, 2015
Randall Teal
Thinking Design: Notes on Process and Pedagogy
Everyone thinks. However, because thinking is a given faculty of human beings it is frequently assumed that what it means to think is clear; and this assumption leads to little attention being paid to the training of thinking itself. Consequently, thinking becomes just something we use to do other things. Gilles Deleuze suggests that this condition results from a long and problematic philosophical legacy; and that such a view of thinking as a given severely limits the real possibilities of thinking – both in terms how thinking is conceived and how it is practiced.
In this article I outline the aforementioned legacy and speculate on ways to proceed from Deleuze’s provocation to think thinking directly, with the key processes of “forgetting” and “questioning” as points of focus. The result is a discussion of the efficacy of certain manners of thinking illustrated through reflections on both my own practice and examples from the design studio.
Everyone thinks. However, because thinking is a given faculty of human beings it is frequently assumed that what it means to think is clear; and this assumption leads to little attention being paid to the training of thinking itself. Consequently, thinking becomes just something we use to do other things. Gilles Deleuze suggests that this condition results from a long and problematic philosophical legacy; and that such a view of thinking as a given severely limits the real possibilities of thinking – both in terms how thinking is conceived and how it is practiced.
In this article I outline the aforementioned legacy and speculate on ways to proceed from Deleuze’s provocation to think thinking directly, with the key processes of “forgetting” and “questioning” as points of focus. The result is a discussion of the efficacy of certain manners of thinking illustrated through reflections on both my own practice and examples from the design studio.
Issue 01
Article, 2015
Article, 2015
Helen Runting & Fredrik Torrison
Yes Boss! The 8 House: Towards a Performative Critique
Seductive, famous and published to the point of saturation, the 8 House in Copenhagen, designed by Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG) and completed in 2010, is a paradigmatic example of an architecture that is oriented towards the reproduction of its own image and thus of its own “project.” From the initial marketing video and press photography to amateur post-occupancy photographs shared online, we trace the ways in which a seemingly simple project (“happiness”) begins to sprawl, positioning its users as fans, and thus as co-producers of a pre-determined narrative. Temporarily inhabiting the positions of visitor and critic, we explore the risks and potentials of giving oneself up to an architectural project, mining that experience in order to arrive at a proposal for the development of a “projective critique.” Ultimately, we conclude, an architecture that requires unconditional surrender (however pleasurable) is incompatible with positive societal transformation. In place of happiness, we therefore suggest the development of an architectural project of hope.
Seductive, famous and published to the point of saturation, the 8 House in Copenhagen, designed by Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG) and completed in 2010, is a paradigmatic example of an architecture that is oriented towards the reproduction of its own image and thus of its own “project.” From the initial marketing video and press photography to amateur post-occupancy photographs shared online, we trace the ways in which a seemingly simple project (“happiness”) begins to sprawl, positioning its users as fans, and thus as co-producers of a pre-determined narrative. Temporarily inhabiting the positions of visitor and critic, we explore the risks and potentials of giving oneself up to an architectural project, mining that experience in order to arrive at a proposal for the development of a “projective critique.” Ultimately, we conclude, an architecture that requires unconditional surrender (however pleasurable) is incompatible with positive societal transformation. In place of happiness, we therefore suggest the development of an architectural project of hope.
Issue 01
Article, 2015
Article, 2015
Thomas A. Rivard
Points of Departure: The Mytho-Poetic Landscape of Cockatoo Island
This paper describes a project entitled Points of Departure, which forms part of a practice-led research investigation into how existing urban space might be both read and written using fiction, narrative and physical interventions. Through key artists and writers such as Poe, Greenaway, Carter, and Piranesi, and a description of an interrogative design process on Cockatoo Island in Sydney, this paper offers insights into how re-mappings, narrative insinuations and operative instruments might harness forces instead of producing forms. The project work was undertaken as both a creative exploration and a pedagogic experiment: five students undertaking an intensive design studio conducted initial exploratory work, my interpretations of which provided the narrative basis for the project. Through these implied fictions, coupled with my own cartographic explorations, I generated “portraits” of the Island (conflating myth and place), which in turn generated briefs for full size instruments made by the students. Finally, responding to these instruments, I created a series of architectural vehicles.
The processes employed in the project and described here did not aim to negate the existing spatial structures of Cockatoo Island but rather acted as an aleatoric, dissonant shifting of parameters to create dynamic relationships between place and its constituents. These imperfect reflections of place created a fluid field of multiple representations, an indeterminate space that prompted novel points of departure for spatial experiences. At the same time they invited an active individual response – a ‘wandering’. This wandering, in which reality is discursive and space and ritual are imperfectly conflated, provokes personal interpretations of space. These disconnected moments of understanding, this paper suggests, offer speculative re-interpretations acting on urban territories in pursuit of spatial openness, generative processes, and ultimately the means by which we can actively perform and participate in the city.
This paper describes a project entitled Points of Departure, which forms part of a practice-led research investigation into how existing urban space might be both read and written using fiction, narrative and physical interventions. Through key artists and writers such as Poe, Greenaway, Carter, and Piranesi, and a description of an interrogative design process on Cockatoo Island in Sydney, this paper offers insights into how re-mappings, narrative insinuations and operative instruments might harness forces instead of producing forms. The project work was undertaken as both a creative exploration and a pedagogic experiment: five students undertaking an intensive design studio conducted initial exploratory work, my interpretations of which provided the narrative basis for the project. Through these implied fictions, coupled with my own cartographic explorations, I generated “portraits” of the Island (conflating myth and place), which in turn generated briefs for full size instruments made by the students. Finally, responding to these instruments, I created a series of architectural vehicles.
The processes employed in the project and described here did not aim to negate the existing spatial structures of Cockatoo Island but rather acted as an aleatoric, dissonant shifting of parameters to create dynamic relationships between place and its constituents. These imperfect reflections of place created a fluid field of multiple representations, an indeterminate space that prompted novel points of departure for spatial experiences. At the same time they invited an active individual response – a ‘wandering’. This wandering, in which reality is discursive and space and ritual are imperfectly conflated, provokes personal interpretations of space. These disconnected moments of understanding, this paper suggests, offer speculative re-interpretations acting on urban territories in pursuit of spatial openness, generative processes, and ultimately the means by which we can actively perform and participate in the city.
Issue 01
Article, 2015
Article, 2015
Julieanna Preston
Moving,,,,
“Moving stuff” was a performance in which mud and shipping pallets shifted repeatedly across a historic, geographic, cultural and political zone demarcated by the Whau River Estuary and Rosebank Road’s industrial sector, Auckland, New Zealand. It explored the complexities of notions of ecology and economy hinged to dynamic processes of material exchange and distribution. “Moving stuff” was also an extension of themes recurring throughout my creative work: labour as a time intensive, often excessively repetitive and seemingly monotonous act, and the female body, my body, an organ that is mine to use as only I can choose, as it is employed as a performative feminist tool. “Moving stuff” tested, therefore, both labour as an untaxed investment tied to capitalism, and labour as part of a feminist, embodied materialist critique. “Moving stuff” saw me toil for eight hours a day for two days, walk more than twenty kilometres, converse with more than 600 people, shift more than 160 litres of mud and 150 pallets and finally return the site to the state in which I found it. The only limit to this labour was my personal exhaustion.
This piece represents one a series of interconnected creative works oscillating around this original performance. Three of those works are presented in this journal: a video entitled Stratified Matter: Moving things again (2013), a recording of a presentation given in October 2013 at the Plenitude & Emptiness symposium, and finally this piece, a photo essay chronicling moments from the original performance. None of these subsequent works are adequate representations of the original, nor can they ever be, rather they are works in their own right. Here I ask the watcher/reader to interpret the scenes presented, or better to interpolate from the scenes presented. These pieces therefore represent an exercise focused on keeping the work moving, or as social scientist Bruno Latour advocates, keeping it in circulation.
“Moving stuff” was a performance in which mud and shipping pallets shifted repeatedly across a historic, geographic, cultural and political zone demarcated by the Whau River Estuary and Rosebank Road’s industrial sector, Auckland, New Zealand. It explored the complexities of notions of ecology and economy hinged to dynamic processes of material exchange and distribution. “Moving stuff” was also an extension of themes recurring throughout my creative work: labour as a time intensive, often excessively repetitive and seemingly monotonous act, and the female body, my body, an organ that is mine to use as only I can choose, as it is employed as a performative feminist tool. “Moving stuff” tested, therefore, both labour as an untaxed investment tied to capitalism, and labour as part of a feminist, embodied materialist critique. “Moving stuff” saw me toil for eight hours a day for two days, walk more than twenty kilometres, converse with more than 600 people, shift more than 160 litres of mud and 150 pallets and finally return the site to the state in which I found it. The only limit to this labour was my personal exhaustion.
This piece represents one a series of interconnected creative works oscillating around this original performance. Three of those works are presented in this journal: a video entitled Stratified Matter: Moving things again (2013), a recording of a presentation given in October 2013 at the Plenitude & Emptiness symposium, and finally this piece, a photo essay chronicling moments from the original performance. None of these subsequent works are adequate representations of the original, nor can they ever be, rather they are works in their own right. Here I ask the watcher/reader to interpret the scenes presented, or better to interpolate from the scenes presented. These pieces therefore represent an exercise focused on keeping the work moving, or as social scientist Bruno Latour advocates, keeping it in circulation.
Issue 01
Article, 2015
Article, 2015
Miguel Paredes Maldonado
The Limits of the Useful: Revising the Operational Framework of Usefulness in Architectural Production
This paper attempts to broaden the conceptual framework of usefulness in architectural production beyond the limited scope of classical utility that has its origins in Vitruvius’ notion of utilitas, a notion that still constitutes a prevailing criterion for the evaluation of any work of architecture. The starting point of this task is the examination of a series of contemporary critical positions concerned with the subversion of conventional relationships established by space, function and time. Hence Bernard Tschumi’s interplay of body and event, Peter Eisenman’s anti- functionalism, Giorgio Agamben’s analysis of the dandy and Georges Bataille’s notion of expenditure are discussed insofar as the operations they describe challenge the direct, univocal relationship between spatial arrangement and functional performance embodied by classical utility. Their arguments are then fed into the characterisation of the mechanisms of the obsolete, the dysfunctional and the dissipative, which are presented as opportunities for a radical departure from conventional notions of usefulness. The paper continues by arguing that in order to consistently evaluate such mechanisms without resorting to a binary categorisation of the useful and the useless we might tap into the conceptualisation of phase spaces elaborated by Manuel de Landa in the context of his readings of Gilles Deleuze. In so doing, the useful becomes a multidimensional range of positions populated with a multiplicity of diverging lines of departure from the asymptotic limit represented by the classical notion of utility. In an attempt to further demonstrate how this conceptual approach can be used to mobilize architectural design methodologies, two projects from my current design research practice are described in the form of an additional, juxtaposed narrative voice that both extends and embodies the theoretical apparatus of the paper.
This paper attempts to broaden the conceptual framework of usefulness in architectural production beyond the limited scope of classical utility that has its origins in Vitruvius’ notion of utilitas, a notion that still constitutes a prevailing criterion for the evaluation of any work of architecture. The starting point of this task is the examination of a series of contemporary critical positions concerned with the subversion of conventional relationships established by space, function and time. Hence Bernard Tschumi’s interplay of body and event, Peter Eisenman’s anti- functionalism, Giorgio Agamben’s analysis of the dandy and Georges Bataille’s notion of expenditure are discussed insofar as the operations they describe challenge the direct, univocal relationship between spatial arrangement and functional performance embodied by classical utility. Their arguments are then fed into the characterisation of the mechanisms of the obsolete, the dysfunctional and the dissipative, which are presented as opportunities for a radical departure from conventional notions of usefulness. The paper continues by arguing that in order to consistently evaluate such mechanisms without resorting to a binary categorisation of the useful and the useless we might tap into the conceptualisation of phase spaces elaborated by Manuel de Landa in the context of his readings of Gilles Deleuze. In so doing, the useful becomes a multidimensional range of positions populated with a multiplicity of diverging lines of departure from the asymptotic limit represented by the classical notion of utility. In an attempt to further demonstrate how this conceptual approach can be used to mobilize architectural design methodologies, two projects from my current design research practice are described in the form of an additional, juxtaposed narrative voice that both extends and embodies the theoretical apparatus of the paper.
Issue 01
Article, 2015
Article, 2015
Sepideh Karami
Pause: A Device for Troubling Routines
Pause is a technique for troubling routines, a tactical device for change capable of disturbing established flows. Where urban public spaces are concerned, a pause is a device, an act however tiny that unsettles the balance or order of those spaces, bringing about a moment of dysfunction in which an individual is liberated for an unspecified duration. While the dominant power is busy ‘fixing’ this pause, alternatives can emerge. In this paper taking on the voice of a fictional character, I investigate the ins and outs of pause through the case of the Standing Man of the Occupy Gezi movement in Turkey (2013). The pause of Standing Man is used as a concept to rethink the architectural profession. Drawing on Lefebvre theory of ‘moment’, pause is discussed as an event destined to fail. This inevitable failure of the pause makes the moment of failure intense and tragic. In this way duration matters, and one of the contributions that architectural practice could make in working with pause would be to work with this duration – and to expand it.
To study further how architecture can contribute to the idea of pause, a case of the unfinished building in Tehran during the 1979 revolution is discussed in relation to the Standing Man. The discussion is built up around the infrastructural nature of pauses, the importance of body politics to the idea of pause as a device and the post-production of space by means of occupation. In this regard, reflecting on the work of architecture, there might be a need for pause in the architectural profession itself, in its attitude to ‘completing’ the world.
The narrator in this paper, an architect who participated in the 1979 revolution, examines the pause of the Standing Man through an architectural lens while watching a video of the event on YouTube. The argument is built up through a lecture on the subject, a discussion with a group of architecture students, and through snippets of nostalgic daydreaming and introverted contemplation. The flashbacks, the lecture, the movie and the train of thoughts interrupt one another, creating moments of pause in the narration.
Pause is a technique for troubling routines, a tactical device for change capable of disturbing established flows. Where urban public spaces are concerned, a pause is a device, an act however tiny that unsettles the balance or order of those spaces, bringing about a moment of dysfunction in which an individual is liberated for an unspecified duration. While the dominant power is busy ‘fixing’ this pause, alternatives can emerge. In this paper taking on the voice of a fictional character, I investigate the ins and outs of pause through the case of the Standing Man of the Occupy Gezi movement in Turkey (2013). The pause of Standing Man is used as a concept to rethink the architectural profession. Drawing on Lefebvre theory of ‘moment’, pause is discussed as an event destined to fail. This inevitable failure of the pause makes the moment of failure intense and tragic. In this way duration matters, and one of the contributions that architectural practice could make in working with pause would be to work with this duration – and to expand it.
To study further how architecture can contribute to the idea of pause, a case of the unfinished building in Tehran during the 1979 revolution is discussed in relation to the Standing Man. The discussion is built up around the infrastructural nature of pauses, the importance of body politics to the idea of pause as a device and the post-production of space by means of occupation. In this regard, reflecting on the work of architecture, there might be a need for pause in the architectural profession itself, in its attitude to ‘completing’ the world.
The narrator in this paper, an architect who participated in the 1979 revolution, examines the pause of the Standing Man through an architectural lens while watching a video of the event on YouTube. The argument is built up through a lecture on the subject, a discussion with a group of architecture students, and through snippets of nostalgic daydreaming and introverted contemplation. The flashbacks, the lecture, the movie and the train of thoughts interrupt one another, creating moments of pause in the narration.
Issue 01
Article, 2015
Article, 2015
Ersi Ioannidou
The House of Multiple Dimensions: Design Referencing as Creative Practice
This paper explores referencing as a creative practice in order to visually describe the role of references in the development of a design research project. The starting point for this exploration is a series of personal sketchbooks, which hold a serendipitous collection of references accumulated during the development of a design project entitled House of Multiple Dimensions. These sketchbooks locate that project in relation to various ideas, objects and experiences and, under closer examination, reveal certain recurring preoccupations directing the project. But in standard presentations of this and similar projects such an accumulation of references remains hidden; attempts to describe the influence of references on the development of a project are commonly limited to a highly controlled exercise in post-rationalisation. As a result many important references go un-acknowledged in attempts to present clarity and progressive linearity. This paper aims to challenge this (either conscious or unconscious) masking of reference material and to reflect on possible creative modes of documentation that acknowledge the role of references in design development.
At the same time design practices tend to passively accumulate references through visual exposure, and as a result the importance of a given reference to a project may easily be overlooked. To this end this paper and the accompanying presentation embrace the challenge of describing the function and role of references in the documentation of a design research project and consider such a description as a form of design research in itself. In this way this collected paper both promotes the idea of referencing as creative practice and highlights how design research as a mode of research might shed new light on wider academic referencing conventions and standard presentation formats.
This paper explores referencing as a creative practice in order to visually describe the role of references in the development of a design research project. The starting point for this exploration is a series of personal sketchbooks, which hold a serendipitous collection of references accumulated during the development of a design project entitled House of Multiple Dimensions. These sketchbooks locate that project in relation to various ideas, objects and experiences and, under closer examination, reveal certain recurring preoccupations directing the project. But in standard presentations of this and similar projects such an accumulation of references remains hidden; attempts to describe the influence of references on the development of a project are commonly limited to a highly controlled exercise in post-rationalisation. As a result many important references go un-acknowledged in attempts to present clarity and progressive linearity. This paper aims to challenge this (either conscious or unconscious) masking of reference material and to reflect on possible creative modes of documentation that acknowledge the role of references in design development.
At the same time design practices tend to passively accumulate references through visual exposure, and as a result the importance of a given reference to a project may easily be overlooked. To this end this paper and the accompanying presentation embrace the challenge of describing the function and role of references in the documentation of a design research project and consider such a description as a form of design research in itself. In this way this collected paper both promotes the idea of referencing as creative practice and highlights how design research as a mode of research might shed new light on wider academic referencing conventions and standard presentation formats.
Issue 01
Article, 2015
Article, 2015
Marc Boumeester
The Bodiless Shadow: Towards a Meta-Medial Framework
This paper seeks to unlock alternative perspectives on both the practice of theory and the theory of practice through the construction of a meta-medial mental framework based on intertwining socio-cultural and architectural conditions (or, rather, force fields). The topic of this investigation is the specific role of (the use of) media in this construction, but of greater importance is the exposé of meta-media as an expression of meta-agency. The field within which this piece of research sits is demarcated by the intrinsic relation between medium, desire and affect, and this paper will be directed towards the exploration of the role of media in the interplay between what was formerly known as perception and the independent force of desire, rendering the hegemony of anthropocentric will obsolete. To this end the following essay is structured around the four ‘scapes’ proposed by Arjun Appadurai (etho-, techno-, ideo- and mediascape) and centres on a fundamental premise around which numerous questions recur, namely: What does the medium want? What is the affective capacity of the medium? How does the medium behave in the different ‘scapes’?
This paper seeks to unlock alternative perspectives on both the practice of theory and the theory of practice through the construction of a meta-medial mental framework based on intertwining socio-cultural and architectural conditions (or, rather, force fields). The topic of this investigation is the specific role of (the use of) media in this construction, but of greater importance is the exposé of meta-media as an expression of meta-agency. The field within which this piece of research sits is demarcated by the intrinsic relation between medium, desire and affect, and this paper will be directed towards the exploration of the role of media in the interplay between what was formerly known as perception and the independent force of desire, rendering the hegemony of anthropocentric will obsolete. To this end the following essay is structured around the four ‘scapes’ proposed by Arjun Appadurai (etho-, techno-, ideo- and mediascape) and centres on a fundamental premise around which numerous questions recur, namely: What does the medium want? What is the affective capacity of the medium? How does the medium behave in the different ‘scapes’?
Issue 01
Article, 2015
Article, 2015
Sophia Banou
Animated Gazes: Representation and Motion in the Kaleidoscopic City
This project critically addresses modes of graphic representations of the city prevalent in architectural discourse, while seeking new ways to make visible the complex weave of movements that form the contemporary urban condition. The architectural conventions employed in transitioning from situated experience to drawing favour the static, while omitting certain fundamental aspects of that situated experience. Through these gaps the inability of normative modes of representation to communicate the kinetic is made clear. Using Edinburgh, birthplace of the kaleidoscope (Brewster) and the panorama (Barker), as a site of investigation this paper examines the discrepancies that appear between matter and appearance (Bergson) within the modalities of urban representations. Moreover, it attempts to reassess the productive agencies of both space and drawing that are lost in the translation from actuality to representation. To this end, and drawing on previous experimentations with notation, the paper introduces the author’s installation Kaleidoscopic City, a representation of a part of the city of Edinburgh first presented at the Plenitude and Emptiness Symposium on Architectural Research by Design (2013).
This project critically addresses modes of graphic representations of the city prevalent in architectural discourse, while seeking new ways to make visible the complex weave of movements that form the contemporary urban condition. The architectural conventions employed in transitioning from situated experience to drawing favour the static, while omitting certain fundamental aspects of that situated experience. Through these gaps the inability of normative modes of representation to communicate the kinetic is made clear. Using Edinburgh, birthplace of the kaleidoscope (Brewster) and the panorama (Barker), as a site of investigation this paper examines the discrepancies that appear between matter and appearance (Bergson) within the modalities of urban representations. Moreover, it attempts to reassess the productive agencies of both space and drawing that are lost in the translation from actuality to representation. To this end, and drawing on previous experimentations with notation, the paper introduces the author’s installation Kaleidoscopic City, a representation of a part of the city of Edinburgh first presented at the Plenitude and Emptiness Symposium on Architectural Research by Design (2013).
Issue 01
Article, 2015
Article, 2015
Hélène Frichot
Five Lessons in a Ficto-Critical Approach to Design Research Practice
This article offers the outline of five preliminary lessons in a ficto-critical approach to creative research practices in architecture, or more precisely, between architecture and philosophy; a transversal relay I pursue through my own research. I will identify these creative and critical practices as operating amidst what can be called an ‘ecology of practices’, a formulation I appropriate from the philosopher of science Isabelle Stengers (who also stresses the power of fiction with respect to explorative practices in the sciences). The five lessons will include: 1. A ficto-critical opening as a means of setting out an approach and what is to follow; 2. Lesson two will commence with Michael Spooner’s Clinic for the Exhausted, in order to discuss the importance of reinventing precursors, and even murdering precedents, because we always-already proceed from amidst an ecology of practices of some kind; 3. Lesson three will open by way of an introduction to Julieanna Preston’s performative project Room, Wool, Me, You (2012) suggesting an instance of an ecology of practices and ‘your situated knowledge’, or how the thinker-doer of design specifically locates her work and best follows the materials of an occasion. 4. Lesson four will open with the posthuman landscapes of joyful affect Margit Brünner composes. Here I will explore ethical experimentation as the reversibility of experiencing-experimenting. Then I will close with a fifth lesson, 5. Making worlds consistent on a plane of nature-thought.
This article offers the outline of five preliminary lessons in a ficto-critical approach to creative research practices in architecture, or more precisely, between architecture and philosophy; a transversal relay I pursue through my own research. I will identify these creative and critical practices as operating amidst what can be called an ‘ecology of practices’, a formulation I appropriate from the philosopher of science Isabelle Stengers (who also stresses the power of fiction with respect to explorative practices in the sciences). The five lessons will include: 1. A ficto-critical opening as a means of setting out an approach and what is to follow; 2. Lesson two will commence with Michael Spooner’s Clinic for the Exhausted, in order to discuss the importance of reinventing precursors, and even murdering precedents, because we always-already proceed from amidst an ecology of practices of some kind; 3. Lesson three will open by way of an introduction to Julieanna Preston’s performative project Room, Wool, Me, You (2012) suggesting an instance of an ecology of practices and ‘your situated knowledge’, or how the thinker-doer of design specifically locates her work and best follows the materials of an occasion. 4. Lesson four will open with the posthuman landscapes of joyful affect Margit Brünner composes. Here I will explore ethical experimentation as the reversibility of experiencing-experimenting. Then I will close with a fifth lesson, 5. Making worlds consistent on a plane of nature-thought.
Issue 01
Call, 2013
Call, 2013
Editors
Call for Submissions: Plenitude and EmptinessSymposium on Architectural Research by Design
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