Thoughts on Architectural Pedagogy, Draft 02, Paragraphs 4, 5
Duplicity, complexity, and ambiguity are necessary to catalyze this slow unveiling of personal power over the space and story and setting of our lives. In my own work this has emerged through an urge to subvert the egocentric tendencies of practice. Reliance on obstructive forms of collaboration has been a way of prefiguring the relationship of the client or public to the building by starting the process of representational cession during the design. In my graduate thesis work I developed and tested a productive, decentralizing mode of representation akin to qualitative specifications. Through a series of research exercises moving from textual instruction sets (borrowed from Robert Morris) to their progeny, then from investigations of a spatial archetype, in this case the motel room, back to reverse engineered instruction sets capable of producing all of its variants greater responsibility was placed on the cultural and experiential baggage of the executor than the quantitative control of the author. This work culminated in a practical dry-run with five of my colleagues producing an installation diverging from prompts culled out of Baudelaire’s ‘The Double Room.’ The architectural instance orchestrated from their designs was elemental yet ambiguous. It was tethered yet adrift. It drew visitors into a scenario that was distinct from its surroundings, that was clearly not a representation of something else, but represented something intrinsic to itself and to their experience with it.
Possibly more unhinged has been a great deal of my work with the work.group, a collaborative architecture cloud that functions via the internet. A complex call-and-response exercise the group undertook was the design and documentation of thirty-one houses in a single month, one per day. The design work was passed back and forth between workers throughout the day based on a prompt and site fodder from a worker at dawn. Nothing but utterly corrupted preconceptions and despoiled personal conceptions of beauty resulted. It was thrilling.