Making & Place
Historically, architectural production has been a regional practice – restrained and empowered by material availability, climate, and cultural practices. These constraints have over time given rise to diverse vernacular architectural styles. Today, our global networks of supply have deconstructed this heterogeneity, overwriting situated knowledge systems. As globalisation slows and concerns grow in regard to both environmental and social sustainability, we face an urgent need to rebuild our relationship with place, but to do so while remaining open to exchange. Act 1 situates itself both locally and globally, and explores the opportunities presented by a synthesis of design, material and fabrication technologies with alternative and community led approaches to making.
Contributors
Shin Egashira,
Summer Islam
Xu TianTian
Moderator
Guillaume Othenin-Girard
Act II
Material Feedbacks
Contemporary building practice is defined by the kit of parts. Working directly with material and allowing the process by which it has been shaped, refined, and assembled to qualitatively affect space has become increasingly difficult. Act 2 reflects on experimental approaches to building through the discussion of a series of projects whose designs have been greatly influenced by how they were made. The role of geometry, the prototype, and the mock-up in establishing architectural language and relating different components of the design process to a final outcome will be a key focus of debate
Contributors
Groupwork
Anne Holtrup
Paolo Tombesi
Moderators
Donn Holohan & Elspeth Lee
Act III
Architetural Armatures
Tools are shaped by ideologies and systems of production but are not necessarily bound to them. Act 3 explores the idea that alternative relationships are possible within the existing industrial complex. Through a repurposing of the tools of mass production, new models are explored. The territory is the relationship between the site and the workshop, and is the act of making itself, where no distinction is drawn between process and object. In this act of renegotiation, new and more sustainable models will be discussed and debated, and novel spatial and tectonic opportunities projected.
Contributors
Groupwork
Anne Holtrup
Yusuke Obuchi
Moderator
Dr. Kristof Crolla