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- Volume 10, Issue 1, 2021
Design Ecologies - Volume 10, Issue 1, 2021
Volume 10, Issue 1, 2021
- Editorial
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- Ecological Design Vision
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Abducted ground: The ineffaceable Beaduric’s Island
By Shaun MurrayThis article illustrates some typical occupational modalities of drawing by abductive processes, involving the design of ecologies through chance and discovery – perhaps through radical innovations – in architecture. First described by the American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce, abductive processes start with an observation or set of observations, then seek to reach the simplest and most likely conclusion from those observations. To design an ecology is to design a system of parts from things, creating a new kind of contextualism. This may not seem radical nor innovative, but the principle of symbiotically designing an ecology for a range of scaled interventions over time using the same context starts to become interesting. From drawing and sketching what you can see in the actual context for a design proposal, to then redrawing and composing the observational drawing in a studio, to the time taken to experience and reflect on the spaces drawn towards making physical objects from the forms resonating as the drawing develops, many modalities occupy a drawing as architecture. These could be viewed as a form of ‘possible worlds’, anticipations, opportunities to shape the drawing world and act in it. It could be of help in prefiguring the risks, possibilities and effects of the architect as the editor of situations in the architectural drawing, and in promoting or preventing broad rules of translation. Creating ethics means creating the world and acting in it, in different (real or abstract) situations and problems. In this way, events and situations can be reinvented, either as opportunities or as risks that lead in new directions. The second part of the article describes some of the ‘26 rules for translation’ through drawing related to the design of ecologies through chance and discovery.
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- Notational Design Vision
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A flight of no substance, collapsing space in its wake
More LessThis article looks at ways in which architecture can be articulated as a sensation within the drawing. The subject of occupying drawings is considered here as a result of entering the drawing, an action John Hejduk describes ‘as a flight of no substance’, collapsing space between the observer and the artefact in its wake. Entering the drawing and subsequently occupying the drawing is considered here as a phenomenon that enables experiential and observational proximity to an artefact and its embedded subject. The collapsing mechanism enforces thinking about the observational intent of this type of entering, its relationship with immediacy and with aspects of the non-representational. Furthermore, the act of entering the drawing is viewed as a technique for mediating and bringing forth subject matter in the drawing. This technique of augmented observation and mediation is in service of the quest for subject presence in the drawing, as opposed to subject representation in the drawing – allowing a residence in close encounter by the maker during production and later by the observer of the resulting artefact. The article is accompanied by a set of drawings from the Drawing Out Gehry series. The drawings are driven by an interest in relational encounters and space they take in. Away from an object or component-directed perception of space and towards the understanding of space as the relationship between elements, this set of drawings is in search of the quality and intrigue raised by the architectural event as the encounter of spatial circumstances.
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- Instructional Design Vision
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The innovations of distortion
More LessThe following article looks at the concept of distortion in technologies of mediation. Distortion is considered a by-product of all media, but its assignation of value reflects cultural assumptions as opposed to objective standards. The two primary conditions looked in this article are anamorphosis and photogrammetry, which are discussed in both historical terms and within contemporary practices. The author includes a few examples of his own work with photogrammetry. In conclusion, the article argues that the qualities of distortion are part of how artists begin to misuse technologies towards aesthetic effects not intended by the original purposes of the media and that this can include any technology of mediation, including the developments of artificial perspective in the Renaissance.
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‘Soft, Wild and Free’: A magical realist fairytale
More Less‘Soft, Wild and Free’ is a magical realist fairytale about a creature that was soft and wild. It is also a magical realist fairytale about the courage of a guerilla princess who freed this creature from its foundations. With my research on magical realism, fairytales and the combination of the two, I am looking into fictional narratives that have the potential for the creation of spaces which are magical and critical. These fictional narratives exist in words and images that are constructed with a sensitivity to ideas of place and a place’s spirit and character. Through the writing I bring together elements from magical realist literature and the classic magical fairytale, into a hybrid style, which then translates into drawings that I make physically and digitally. Clay, wood, card models, as well as sketches, orthographic drawings and paintings of buildings weave into a series of drawings whose scope is to suggest a version of architecture with a critical and poetic stance to the world. These drawings propose buildings as characters and characters as places that talk about the past and the present while imagining a poetic and critical future. In my work there are three types of processes, which are based on translations; two intersemiotic and one interlingual. The two intersemiotic translations are from writing to drawings and models and from drawings to writing; the interlingual translation is from modern Greek to English. These processes become spatial acts, as they allow for a perpetual generation of fictional and factual stories in words and images. My research is rooted in an inherent understanding of architecture through a literature that is critical and magical, an existential potion for our allegedly normal and normative world, which is really a wondrous, magical realist dream.
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- Aesthetical Design Vision
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The sculptor-architect: In rêverie
More LessAs an architectural designer who has also worked as a figurative sculptor, my practice-led research sees the bringing together of sculptural modelling techniques with the sculpting of architectural drawings. Taking a singular reference to a lost architectural treatise by Michelangelo as its prompt, this article considers Renaissance sculptural practice as offering an alternate disciplinary footing to the norms that developed around Alberti; to which the development of contemporary architectural practice can be attributed. Through a process that moves towards drawing by way of a historically informed adoption of clay sketching, which is used to develop and inform an experimental polychromatic ceramic practice and virtual reality modelling techniques, my activities as a sculptor-architect critique the corporeal dismissals that marked the codifications of the Renaissance. Central to this is the capacity of disegno, which as a term was paramount for the era’s repositioning of architecture, painting and sculpture as liberal arts, to suggest broader approaches to design than an immediate reliance on drawing.
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