Design Ecologies - Current Issue

Scaffolding is a necessary attribute when you are building and constructing buildings in practice and in design. Through design practice we use scaffolding to hold ideas, a thought, a method of making, that allows us to engage with the main focus of the project. Scaffolding has many types of operation and activation, as you will discover while reading this issue of Design Ecologies, which focuses on ‘architectural scaffolding’. The five articles in this issue offer varied and wide-ranging types of scaffoldings for their projects. It is important to note that these are all practicing designers, mostly in architecture, that are constantly searching for new ways to articulate and communicate their ideas as their projects and practices evolve over time. The patterns of how we use architectural scaffolding in space is a fascinating thing to study, but difficult to visualize – the soaring and swooping doesn’t leave a trail, the way a boat does in water. Using time-based methods, we can begin to showcase the patterns of our architectural scaffolding like the faint lines and marks in the construction of a drawing.

Architecture is caught in a conundrum. The motivation for building architecture is usually to satisfy someone’s desire to do something in a specific place. The architect professes to know how to facilitate that something yet knows that the architectural programme is reductive and does not cover the range and extent of likely and unlikely things that might take place in and around a built work. As a result, architects are caught between legitimizing their practice (and livelihood) to others through a rational exposition of explicit thoughts about how something can be accomplished while simultaneously knowing that what they really do has other unpredictable dimensions that are hard to grasp and harder to articulate.

In his incomplete masterpiece, The Arcades Project, Walter Benjamin advanced a spatial mapping technique that disassembled metaphors of narration to reassemble them as metaphors of the gaze. The work, which is a composition of unfinished and changeable fragments, highlights two aspects that captivate me. Firstly, the importance of a tangible medium to support ideas, such as a book, an image or an atlas. Secondly, the physical spaces that inspire and manifest these ideas, such as the library, the passage and the city. This article visualizes a dynamic structure for the organization of thought and imagination through assembled visual constructs. A spatial configuration, a scaffold observed at different scales forming a porous machinic arrangement altogether. Geometry works as a skeleton for our mental space, readying to be fleshed by imagination, it lays foundations, and sets up the grid. It charts a design trajectory at an a-scalar dimension. Zooming in across said scales, which can be read in no particular order, one can inhabit five moments in the construction of the design process. It visits the depths of our mental space, surveys its structure for imagination; enters musée imaginaires; dissects concepts; materializes, frame-by-frame, in an in situ diagram, ending at the threshold of a line. It proposes a conceptual charter to articulate a taxonomy of possibilities and modes of design immersion. One scaffold, multiple views. This article is accompanied by drawings from my Speculative Assemblies folio. Work that addresses issues of construction, translation and the transformation of meaning through assembled visual constructs. Such translation aims not at a reproduction but a reincarnation of the original, taking on a life of its own in a new language, a mode of expression, a new construct. The action of drawing an architecture that is materialized rather than represented within the drawing, where it can be pursued, found and experienced.

Scaffoldings often make the buildings look intriguing, overlapping and obscuring areas that are about to change and evolve. The article explores ways architecture can engage the inhabitant as an active participant in the design process. It discusses the scaffolding as a design continuum that provides opportunities for the architecture to continually adjust and reconfigure. It explores intersections of architecture with visual arts, such as surrealist photography, painting and filmmaking, emphasizing on the motion of the human body and how studying relevant examples might offer propositional opportunities to architectural design. A design outcome of my research practice, discussed in the article, is the design of an experimental dwelling titled Analogical House. To unpack in more depth, it focuses on one of the domestic fragments of the dwelling – the Staircase – and the iterative design experiments that inform its design process. A new type of architectural machine – The Darkroom Probe – is developed to explore the dwelling by creating a series of architectural drawings through a series of prototypes and photographic set pieces. Their findings, often analogue and digital hybrids, gradually form the Analogical House.

This article explores the concept of dreams as an imaginative scaffold in installation art and sculpture, focusing on my artistic practice. The exploration emphasizes the potential for immersive experiences that engage multiple senses, utilizing dream maps and drawing to organize and comprehend the dream world. Rooted in my current drawing and sculptural methodology, this article delves into potential connections between dreams, real places, architecture and immersive digital technologies, such as virtual reality (VR), acknowledging their remarkable capacity to enrich sculptural expression. This dynamic interplay paves the way for innovative experiences that seamlessly integrate contemporary sculpture with cutting-edge technologies, where dreams act as both raw material and structural metaphors. The resulting typologies and architectural designs, a result of the process of ‘dream hunting’, serve as the cornerstone of a burgeoning sculptural methodology, wherein architecture, landscape and topography assume vital roles, making space for the concept of the total installation to arise. Introducing the ‘dream city’ as a conclusive case study and a meta scaffolding, I propose the physical reconstruction of dreams through VR and photogrammetry, delineating their unique conceptual and ontological attributes. This ongoing project suggests that by bringing together all the aforementioned elements, an embodiment of hidden desires and profound meaning within its intricate structures comes to the surface through the dream’s perseverance in intermediated forms (drawing, sculptural objects), where identity, memory and historicity create connections to real locations and experiences. Lastly, this article serves as a reflection of an ongoing and evolving artistic practice, where I explore and develop the concept of the dream city. It serves as documentation of my progress, capturing the process of filling in the parts and uncovering the missing segments of this artistic realm.