Disciplines: Photography
Reflexive Practice
Files: abstract, poster, full paper
Fragments from proceedings (‘artefact submission’)’:
Abstract.
How can different creative practices inform and challenge each other? And, how can medial transpositions contribute to operate complex conditions in architectural creation? This project addresses the process of architectural creation as a trans-medial practice, here instantiated as an encounter between text, drawing, photography and model. The project enquires how these distinct medial affordances affect the architectural articulation through transpositions and interactions between them within an iterative process.
Keywords.
Architectural Media, Drawing, Model, Photography
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RESEARCH STATEMENT
The presented material is part of an ongoing research project on trans-mediality in the process of architectural creation. The enquiries are conducted through iterative series in the media of text, drawing, photography and model. The different stages of the process will be documented, but the presentation will put emphasis on the process of interaction between a physical model and photography. The contention of the project is that any material articulation always is engaged in and inseparable from its specific medial mode of expression. A given problem materialises in different ways when it is processed in different media and media environments. Thus, the differentiation of medial affordances is essential: the differences enacted in the trans-medial practice work as a vehicle for creation, premised on the transgression of the specific medium’s limitations. To identify specific medial affordances, the project enquiries establish sets of specific media environments.
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Film-Space Transcription
Files: abstract, poster, full paper
Fragments from proceedings (‘artefact submission’)’:
Abstract.
During my undergrad and Master’s studies, I was always exposed to the way my friends in other related fields, specificity film studies, approach to creating space. I constantly learned about possibilities that other canons can bring to my approach to space and design. I took a course which explored film as transcription for architectural design under supervision of Prof. Deborah Hauptmann at TU in Delft. I did my diploma at TU Vienna under supervision of Prof. Will Alsop under constant exchange with my cinematographic friends – using their cameras, their materials, their skills – to finish my studies.
10 Years later, a new big interior project is now the basis to develop this exchange further. Together with a director friend the idea emerged to pretend to do a movie while we are actually doing an interior design. We started to meet with an award winning costume designer and a lighting designer who is specifically interested in opera lightning after doing film. We considered different approaches, exchanging ideas, talking about plots and sequences. Things began to come exciting, suddenly a very problematic skylight became a very exciting artificial light source in the ceiling. The director instantly filled the apartment with buzzling situations of daily life, fabrics are chosen thinking about tangling toes at the end of a couch. Furthermore we are looking for a director of photography to picture the flat out of the mind of a film, as well for a sound designer who should be in charge of p.e the noise a moving chair produces on a wooden floor.
My study is a new approach to my architecture, much different from my working process of my former projects. In previous projects, very often, I worked solo, had limited budgets and time frame to create a concept or main idea. This research now is embedded in one of my current very different interior design projects for a private person in Vienna with very exclusive budget starting now being finished in approx. 6 months. Working on this project now together with a constant growing team of filmmakers is an spectacular opportunity to see which spatial possibilities emerge out of this exchange. The question is what kind of quality and depth can this bring to my architecture? What kind of new ideas, space settings, colour concepts, material suggestions and lightning conditions can be produced?
I came to this study proposal, following the review of relevant literature in the field and analysis of the major architectural projects in the past 5 years of working as an architect. I tried to look at things, which mattered most to me. I looked at my work done at Querkraft Architects in Vienna. I looked into the work of the stage designer Es Devlin. All of this research done including the story written above leaded me finally to the theme I suggest now to start with my PhD.
Keywords.
Film, photography, spatial possibilities, colour, light, sound
Questioning Images
Files: abstract, poster, full paper (= extended abstract)
Fragments from proceedings (‘abstract submission’)’:
Abstract.
The advancement and popularization of image processing techniques in the last twentyfive years has provided architects with a powerful tool to merge research and design. If the history of photography is the history of the duplication and recycling of reality, then the history of the digitization of photography can be read as the history of the possibility of blending the duplicated real and the virtual. By intervening seamlessly on photographs, it is now easier than ever to conflate a particular reality and its potential transformation, thus interrogating the very essence of said reality by providing an apparently plausible version of it.
Some of the prospects of this design driven research methodology are exposed here through the analysis of a speculative project that was produced for the XV Venice Biennale of 2016. The project used digital collage to initiate a collective conversation on the landscape of naked objects exposed by the building crisis in Spain, questioning the underlying processes made visible by the abandoned constructions –in short, a model of urban development that maximizes profit through the repetition of the same, ‘exclusive’ private units. In order to transform this reality into an expression of a community generated through difference, the conversation focused on the imaginary appropriation of twelve unfinished units of an interrupted development in L’Enova, a small village located 55 kilometers south of Valencia. Each interlocutor acted on a photograph of each unit with the only constraint of using the same graphic ingredients: a selection of 100 pictures to use in the digital collage. Beyond this constraint, the only limits were those of each individual approach to the project.
The most interesting aspect of this landscape of distinct voices is that, when placed in parallel, they revealed the potential of the conversation when it becomes a project. The twelve colonized photographs no longer appeared as a melancholic witness of what could have been, but as a tangible document that materialized a possible model, showing that the debris of an exhausted system of urban development can be reused as the foundations for an alternative form of urbanization. In so doing, lacadenadecristal elicited a new set of questions on the role of digital collage in contemporary design and research, for it proved to be a methodology that simultaneously serves as a design tool, a method of interrogation of a specific reality, and a prime communicative asset to engage multiple audiences.
Keywords.
photography; digital collage; design driven research