Unreasonable Creatures
Urs Bette
Unreasonable Creatures: Architecture and (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 (above), and a matrix of projects arranged in the form of a document (downloadable above); 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.
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Figures
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Unreasonable Creatures: Dissection B (Dissecting the Whale), Installation, RMIT Design Hub.
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