SPECIALISATION 1: ADVANCED ARCHITECTURAL DESIGN
SPECIALISATION 2: ARCHITECTURE AND PERFORMATIVE DESIGN
SPECIALISATION 3: ARCHITECTURE AND CRITICAL SPATIAL PRACTICE
SPECIALISATION 1: ADVANCED ARCHITECTURAL DESIGN (AAD)
Prof. Dr. Johan Bettum
SAC’s specialisation, Advanced Architectural Design (AAD) is devoted to building design as the crucible of architectural practice and discourse. It engages with architecture as the sensual and critical interplay of individual and collective imaginations, material forms and inhabitable space, as well as flows of technologically mediated processes and effects and design intelligence. AAD sees architectural design as a vital and vanguard force in the transformation and future of urban culture, capable of responding to and staging individual and collective interests, private and public desires as well as social and political realities.
In this moment in time, when developments in architectural design are all but consumed by media transmitted fashions and the escalation of public and private investment in the representational value of iconic form, AAD pursues architectural design as a potent and disciplinary specific means to intercept historical flows of formative and materialised ideas and forms of production. In these terms, AAD sees design as the most powerful form of exploring the future of architecture both on a practical and a discursive level.
Architectural design embodies forms of synthesis that are capable of assimilating new technology as well as transformations in the structure of how things are conceived and made. However and more importantly, architectural design is the most potent means to mount a critique and resistance to contemporary conditions inherent to architecture itself (not the least, its modes of production, material practice and conventions of representation) as well as the societal and cultural conditions that impinge on these. That architectural design is synthetic means precisely that it is able to make a coherent overall strategy out of relations between disparate things in a context, both disciplinary and not, that continue to be vaguely defined.
In doing so, architectural design is both adductive and opportunistic. It gathers flows of information and production and deploys strategies for directing these to realise intentions relating to a desired future. It draws on its own massive, disciplinary specific history that offers precedents for design intentions and formal and informal effects within culturally specific settings. It is adductive in how it focuses lessons from a wide spectrum of historical flows, building specific knowledge and technologically driven design procedures to effectuate its immense potential for production.
In AAD, this condition is addressed through architecture’s intrinsic materialist and aesthetic foundations. Design thinking and practice infuses this aesthetic materialist basis with a projective value ‘to use and transcend today’s constraints for tomorrow’s possibilities.’ Thus, architectural design is hypothesis-driven; it employs conjectural strategies to ‘[make] use of new and emergent possibilities within its own process of production.’ Lastly, architectural design is both inquiring and value-driven. It is willing to address and ‘explicitly engage with its audience.’1
1 Part of this description of architectural design relies on Jeanne Liedtka’s description of ‘design thinking,’ as published in: Jeanne Liedtka, “In Defense of Strategy as Design,” California Management Review 42, no. 3 (2000): 8-30. Liedtka, in turn, presents her formulation on the basis of: Vladimir Bazjanac, “Architectural Design Theory: Models of the Design Process” (Paper presented at the Basic Questions of Design Theory, Columbia University, New York, 1974).
2011-12: Streams of Urban Materialism
During the academic year, 2011-12, SAC’s AAD will continue its commitment to architectural design and new forms of materialism to investigate streams of ‘urban matter.’ In its built form, architecture channels enormous flows of materials on every level of human occupation and consumption. It does so not only through its own construction, but in particular in the way that architecture accommodates individual and collective human life.
In this sense, urban materialism comprises an indefinite range of flows that can be addressed as matter, information, productive force and through human consumption. As examples, only food and waste go a long way to illustrate complex material fluxes and how our lives are in part organised around these streams, intervene on and mingle with them. The research questions that AAD will pose are broadly speaking: how architecture is affected by select forms of urban materialism and how it can engage with these? The issue soon becomes how architecture as individual building complexes integrates in a larger network of material and productive flows and how this settles the form and space of a building into a vast political and urban context.
AAD will initially pursue these questions in a generic sense, drawing on a series of specific texts that address materialism informed by the writings of Gilles Deleuze and others. It will formulate critical positions as vantage points for moving on to a European city and a specific building task, and continue to probe the question of an urban materialism through quantitative and qualitative models for critical design interventions and projective thought.
Based on a platform of conceptual and theoretical models, AAD will address urban materialism as the crux of architecture’s contribution to urban culture - far beyond the idea of sustainability, far beyond the fact of materials themselves.