Materials: Paper / artefact

5

What Modes of Design Research are Transformative and Venturous?

Files: abstract, full paper

Fragments from proceedings (‘paper submission’)’:

Abstract. 

Design although it generates a building is also a search for meaning, for a change in values and perceptions and even a change in power and politics, although in some instances it is a search to legitimise existing power dynamics and entrench them. 

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In the South African context where our built environment and cities are struggling more than twenty years into democracy to subvert their Apartheid segregationist beginnings, design research has the capacity to understand the historical connections between design, power and politics, and purposefully subvert them and even venture new modes of practice.

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What are the most effective modes or routes through which architectural design research can be pursued which support and forward the transformation imperative of both academia and practice? Can the intellectual space and conditions be created that support a strong critical culture of architectural design research, with its’ hopefully resultant transformation of our built environment?

Through analysing various international Design Research modes and their applicability to the South African context, an understanding will be gained of how Design Research can be transformative and venturous both within practice and academia, but also within the larger socio-political context. As Teddy Cruz so aptly put it “new’.

Keywords. 

Design Research; Modes; Transformative; Venturous; South Africa

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In the South Africa, where our built environment and cities are struggling more than twenty years into democracy to subvert their Apartheid segregationist beginnings, design research that has the capacity to understand the historical connections between design, power and politics, and purposefully subvert and transform them and venture new modes of practice.

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

Earth as a Contemporary Design Object

Files: abstract, poster, full paper

Fragments from proceedings (‘paper submission’)’:

Abstract.

Unfired earth materials present an opportunity for sustainable architecture on different levels. From an environmental point of view, earth has a triple benefit in the life cycle; the resource being abundantly available, the low need of energy to process the material and the potential for harmless disposal at the end of life. dditionally, in order to create a successful sustainable design, the material needs to be appreciated by its users, whether it is used for a building, building component or an object.

This research aims to put forward ways of using earth in a contemporary way through the method of Material Driven Design. The aim is to propose unfired earth material applied in a way that is attractive to the user and, meanwhile, taking into account environmental aspects. Exploratory interviews and a survey with a public of laymen and architect/designers were done to analyse the way they experience (unfired) earth. This input was used during the designing and building of an earth object; a combined phone vault and bedside lamp.

Rather than designing a building or building part, an object allows to go more profound into refining the shape, texture, production process and finishing method. Meanwhile, the deliberate choice of making a daily object, allows to introduce a more general public in order to provoke discussion on the material experience of earth. This way the object design can potentially function as a catalyst, between raw material and full-scale construction.

This paper gives an overview on the former steps (interviews, survey) and following reflections on potential tracks of using earth when applied in a contemporary western European context. The research for design phase guided the design process towards a specific shape and materiality. The process of materialisation is briefly presented, from material tinkering to a very defined production process. Lastly, a further example on how to apply a similar research and design process in future earth designs or applications on an architectural scale will be presented. Keywords. earth; contemporary; design; material experience

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Conclusions
Throughout this paper, the designing and building of an object out of earth object has been put forward. The use of the Material Driven Design method guided the design process, onsisting of several consequent steps: a technical and experiential characterization of unfired earth, followed by the creation of a material experience vision and concluding with a design and built prototype of the design.
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Drawing and the Cognitive Niche

Files: abstract, poster, full paper

Fragments from proceedings (‘paper submission’)’:

Abstract.

My drawing practice explores place. I return to the same place and draw, I take materials and alter their state to make drawings. I spend time repeatedly within a place to understand the knowledge gained. I draw to gain knowledge and to understand. In one location I have returned to draw from the same spot repeatedly over a year, initially as a reflection upon Merleau-Ponty’s stance on a phenomenology of movement. These repetitive acts of drawing enabled a layered situated perception of that environment, my research became fully focussed upon drawing as a tool for engagement with the environment.
The science of cognition has opened new philosophical approaches to perception and cognition. The stance of situated cognition theory is concerned with the notions of embodiment, embedding and extension (Robbins and Aydede). These three conceptions envisage cognition as a process involving a multi-sensory individual moving within a contributory dynamic environment, which allows perception to build and knowledge to be generated (Noe). This knowledge can be used to relate to and alter the environment.

Drawing can be considered part of a cognitive process and I wish to explore this within my research. Drawing takes its place as does, seeing, perception and art within a philosophy of biologically structured organisation (Noe). Research in the biological sciences, are producing paradigms around the idea of extended physiology. A suggestion that some processes central to biology lie external to the organism Wilson). This seems analogous to the notions within situated cognition theory particularly that of niche construction theory (Odling-Smee). This contends that organisms make changes to their environment which then feedback and have an effect upon the development of the organism.

The concept of the niche has been developed within other research disciplines for example the social niche and the cultural niche, however that of the cognitive niche (Tooby & DeVore) is of interest within my research. Cognitive niche theory places cognition within a fully situated compartmentalised space where thoughts, concepts and memories are held. This extended space elides physiological thought processes with our inhabited environments.
In my paper I contend that drawing is a tool which changes our environments, and is a process which allows humans to create niches. My paper places my durational drawing practice within the context of cognitive niche construction theory. This opens the possibility of re-framing drawing within a cognitive process.

Keywords.
Drawing; Cognitive niche; Situated cognition

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I discovered that to draw at that scale I needed to rely on my bodily movement. My drawing movements were expansive and on refection were tuned to the movements of the sea, the time spent immobile, drawing the sea, had seemingly created learnt rhythmic patterns which now created the drawing. Creating the in situ drawings had produced a sustantial scaffolding for a more developed drawing exercise, an enhanced drawing process culminating in the production of the larger finished drawing.

I discovered that my imobility was inconsequential to any understanding of a phenemonology of movement, however it enabled my considerations within a cognitive niche, creating thoughts as objects, building scaffolds to generate new thoughts and new objects and allowing the possibility of creating new knowledge. This project clearly linked location and continuity and was therefore concerned with the enviroment of that particular beach. Thoughts as objects of that beach, thoughs as objects that allows collection and distribution of knowledge of that particular beach organised within a cognitive niche with open-ended cognitive possibilties of further sequential cognitive niches. Thus a drawing practice plays an important part within cognitive processes, and a durational drawing practice concerning our location can, I believe, contribute significantly to understanding the environment within which we live.

Moving Ground

Files: abstract, poster, full paper

Fragments from proceedings (‘paper submission’)’:

Abstract.
The research main question comes from the observation of the construction phase of landscape architecture interventions, from private gardens to public parks planned and realized in the south part of Switzerland, as an opportunity to think about ground movements connected to the realization of projects that deal with changes of the site’s surface and ground transformations inside landscape.

The first step of the investigation is indeed a critical recognition, through photographs and topographical drawings, that interprets both the physical and the inspirational aspects of a number of earthworks, resulting from the excavations for buildings foundations, from land leveling processes and embankments or, most of all, from the inert waste relocation inside depots. In particular the investigation scrutinize their effects inside everyday perceived and familiar landscape, to finally question how today, beyond economic concerns, earth management practices and soil resources assessments, environmental and sustainability programs on a global and on a local scale, this earthworks could enter the design process.
The critical observation proceeds together with the construction of a theoretical framework, from the founding meaning of re-shaping the land with earth, moving through Dinocrate, Vitruvio and Leon Battista Alberti, Gottifried Semper, Robert Smithson or John Latham and the shifting of the significance of ground inside ecological urbanism and environmental landscape design, up to examine more technical literature that underlines the fundamental role of advanced technological approaches and normative aspects about moving earth inside construction sites. The overview of on-going infrastructural projects, like the AlpTransit railway, that deeply affect landscape and imply complex building sites, allows the observation of great earth’s volumes often not acknowledged and not easy to recognize, spread as spoils inside the nearest territories. The research, trough maps, sections and topographical drawings, finally becomes a chance to sight, inside broad and heterogeneous environments, how it is possible to relocate, reuse and recycle earth.

Keywords.
Moving ground, Landscape architecture, Earthworks, Infrastructural monument, Construction sites, Topographical drawings

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Conclusion

The research is intended as an instrument to interpret and deepen the compositional, strategic meaning of moving ground actions inside the contemporary landscape design process.

Conclusions at this point of the research are intermediate, since the investigation is still in progress, however, the main objectives could be summarized as follows: • to foster a critical attention to the understanding of the landscape spaces resulting from ground movements during construction activities of infrastructures and to witness the effects of contemporary constructive actions on landscapes. • To claim the strategic value of design as a mean to find creative solutions between formal structures (revealing contemporary figurative and symbolic value of the ground) and fun tional requirements (as reuse of earth, reduction of C&D inert waste, optimization of construction sites in landscape, valorisation of new ecologies). • To evidence how landscape design interventions can inspire technical and ethical changes in infrastructures construction fields and vice versa. • To reflect on how, millennia after first ancestral earth mounds, earthworks inside landscape could today become part of a continuously renewed sublime collective imagination.

Details and Totalities

Files: abstract, poster, full paper

Fragments from proceedings (‘paper submission’)’:

Abstract.

This paper presents a sustained reflection on two large urban design experiments. The reflection describes an emergent effect named “epistemic reciprocity”. The latter part of the paper grounds its description in a body of design theory. The design experiments were carried out in Pendrecht/Zuidwijk (Rotterdam, NL) and Hellersdorf-Süd (Berlin, DE). Both areas are post-war urban expansions that are in need of an update in terms of urban sustainability. The design experiments were devised to explore and document the spatial possibilities of urban renewal and the epistemic potentials of architectural design. The reflection for this paper deals with the oppositional interplay between details and totality; large visions and tiny details; structural decisions and local details. This dialectic between the details and their totality can be couched in epistemic terms. Between the two opposites, an emergent effect of “epistemic reciprocity” occurs. Without details, the design proposal seems void; yet, it cannot be reduced to a collection of details. Dealing with totalities and details can be done in such a way that different scales of a given proposal reciprocally support each other. Knowledge from one level triggers insights on adjacent levels. Prudently switching between detail and totality enables these moments of “epistemic reciprocity”. The movement of zooming in and out on an idea is not only useful for defining details but is indispensable for developing parallel tracks of thought.

Keywords. 

design theory, architectural design, epistemology, research through design, urbanism

/…/ it follows that totality and detail exist on the same ontological plane. It also follows that knowledge production is not confined to fact-finding but can consist in other forms of insight. These insights are enabled through systematic design experimentation unfolding at multiple levels in parallel. This parallel development is a way to bring detail and totality together in ways that fit a situation. Yet, thoughtful detailing adds – at its own scale level – coherence and intelligible meaning to the totality. Designing, then, develops the many scale levels of a future world in parallel. Overall design ideas (totalities) intersect on user interfaces (details), creating insights that could not be obtained without a multi-level, conceptional process of making. In this process, in-formation becomes information. The knowledge derived from the searching process can be used for inferential reasoning, discursive practices and reflections on such topics as everyday usage, atmosphere, construction or ecology.

Epicurus Garden

Files: abstract, poster, full paper

Fragments from proceedings (‘artefact submission’)’:

Abstract.
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EPICURUS GARDEN The garden of the Epicurus (341-270 BCE). Different from other philosophers that practiced in public, Epicurus created an enclosed space in which a more inclusive school could be established. One could argue that the enclosed space of the garden was more public than the open space of the Painted Stoa where Zeno practiced. In the area around EPICURUS’ GARDEN, figures are meandering in a landscape of fragments. The spaces they explore, are constructed as an enfilade, it is a suite. A strange loop, a garden of forking paths, develops between Yard and World…

THE PERFORMANCE AS ARTEFACT The performance is a combination of a performed text and a piano score performed live. It becomes operatic. It is an experiment to explore the (musical) performance as research practice with the goal to test the ‘performance’ as a new vantage point on the author’s practice research, and from within this practice research. Epicurus Garden searches for ways to induce the practice research. The performance is designed as an enfilade that unfolds in the discursive space between: ‘Place, Moment, Relation’ and ‘Sound, Space, Wor(l)ds’, between Yard and World.

DRAWN INTO A STATE OF DISTINCTION The performance is an outlet of the design-driven research that examines the manifold of the authors’ practice. This manifold is an ecology of practices composed out of four ‘studios’: The Faculty Studio, the Office Studio, the Research Studio and the (Music) Composing Studio. The design driven research explores the mechanism of the ‘operationality’ of the form of re-entry. The real interest lies in the ‘spaces’ between the practices.
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Keywords.
Performance as artefact, Practice Research, Architecture

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DIALOGUES for piano solo – revisited and re-composed
The artefact is the performance of a piece of music (a suite, an enfilade, a cycle) as described in the research statement. For this a piano grand (probably ¼) will be placed in the artefact room of the CA2RE conference. At the time of writing, the involvement of a second instrument (human voices or other in under research).

From Geo-politics to Geo-poetics

Files: abstract, poster, full paper

Fragments from proceedings (‘paper submission’)’:

Abstract. 

For more than five decades, the School of Valparaíso in Chile has endeavored to develop a pedagogy and research in architecture based on the experience of building speculative works of architecture, away from traditional methods of research and theoretical production. This commitment for the Work has been materialized in projects such as the Open City and the Travesías of Amereida. However, and almost contradictory, this attitude towards architecture is based on a geo-poetic vision of the South American continent created by this School in the mid-sixties, which is postulated as a fundamental element in the development of architectural projects.

This geo-poetic vision emerged from the Travesía of Amereida in 1965, a wandering trip through the interior lands of South America, seeking to ‘unveil’ them through poetry and art in action, inquiring into the question of ‘being American’ and its correlation with the inhabited (and uninhabited) territory of the continent. From this original experience, the Thesis of the Interior Sea (1971) is formulated, taking the geo-poetic vision to the field of architecture and urbanism, and establishing a position facing the geopolitics of the seventies, particularly with the visions on the development of the South American region towards the Asia Pacific front.

However, for the School, this vision must be linked to the architecture-praxis. For this reason, since 1984 the Travesías are a direct experience of architecture carried out on the territory, whose main objective is to “unveil” the South American continent through the development of different design practices of architecture and design.

This paper aims to present the meanings of the geo-poetic embodiment of the Interior Sea and its transcription in the architectural-praxes developed in the Travesías over the last five decades, decoding how the iteration between descriptive, narrative and performative praxis allows to simultaneously build metaphorical and critical insights about the transformation of territories driven by continental urbanization and its architectural incarnation.

The presentation is based on the analysis of historical archive documents and experiences as professor at the School of Valparaíso.

Keywords. 

Geo-poetic; territory; design-practice; urbanization

Ongoing research

Based on this historical analysis and experiences as professor at the School of Valparaíso, this ongoing research aims to trace and decode how the origin and deployment of the Travesías in the Interior Sea has faced the historical and current urbanization of the continent, understanding urbanization, on the one hand, as the means by which the Travesías reach isolated places of the continent, and on the other, as the current process by which new remote territories are integrated into the global, but mainly for the exploitation of natural resources, paradoxically causing the displacement or resistance of places that are virtually unknown to the world.

Mapping and re-tracing of the Inner(s) Sea(s) based on the narratives and Works of more than 250 Travesías throughout South America (1965:1984-2019) aims to open up other ways of representing -digitally- the relationship between geo-poetics and a continent in transformation, overcoming the traditional methods of descriptive geography and geopolitics. Finally, this research expects to contribute in the current discussion within the academia committed to approaching subjects –such as urbanization and territorialization– through design practices beyond the disciplinary boundaries of architecture.

Entropy and Performance

Files: abstract, poster, full paper

Fragments from proceedings (‘abstract submission’)’:

Abstract.

This paper and the accompanying exhibit of drawings and film, will build on previous CA2RE presentations that looked at the relationship between tacit and explicit knowledge in the discipline of architecture by presenting a current research project that has measured and mapped environmental data and social experience in a modern Irish school building from the late nineteen seventies, and will present design propositions about how this building could be conserved and protected into the future while addressing the technical flaws that are currently contributing to its decline;- Completed in time for the Iranian oil crisis of 1979, and predicated on an almost unlimited supply of electricity by burning turf from the surrounding boglands, Birr School struggles with the changed environmental context of reduced fossil fuel consumption in the current century. Recognised as an exemplar of modern architecture, the building has been awarded funding by the Getty Foundation under its Keeping it Modern conservation initiative to support the development of a conservation management plan.

The research goes beyond mere conservation to analyse the relationship between environmental performance of the school fabric and the social experience of students who learn there. The data gathered includes quantitative analysis of heat loss, phpp analysis, air-quality measurement, daylight measurement, etc. and overlays these on qualitative data provided by students into their social and somatic experiences of the spaces. In examining the correlation between these data sets, the research seeks to test a hypothesis about the lived experience of a mat-building being conducive to social wellbeing. This hypothesis argues that thermally textured environments are necessary to stimulate learning and that the standard comfort conditions anticipated by contemporary building regulations may not be appropriate for schools.

The last part of the research is propositional in nature as it makes design proposals for ways to address the environmental failings of the building while still preserving the qualitative experience of the spaces. The project draws on design precedents such as Hunstanton School by the Smithsons, and the Free University of Berlin by Candillis, Josic, and Woods, as well as theoretical ideas from sources as diverse as Gottfried Semper and Inaki Abalos. The architectural propositions also build on other design projects within my practice, where the roof has emerged as an important locus of design, and it will extrapolate these to suggest ways that the school can continue to perform for decades to come.

Keywords.

Entropy; Environment; Performance; Integrated Paradigm

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

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