Prof. Riet Eeckhout
Campus: Ghent
Language: EN
Engagement: Mediating Tactics
Sem 3
Drawing Architecture: The event as spatial encounter
Studio Drawing Architecture invites students to generate architectural proposals by exploring urban events and the spatial opportunities they generate. Here, the event is understood as a time-based encounter between activities, incidents, and situations within the urban fabric. We will design architecture as an occurrence in a relational field— between space, movement, and event — rather than conceptualised as an isolated and static object.
The event, located by and constituted through the continuously changing relationship between elements, is intrinsically spatial and time-based: The event takes in space as it unfolds over time. It is its narrative character, based on sequence and simultaneity, with human and non-human actors and disrupters, hypothetical or in real-time, that stimulates the imagination towards the production of speculative thought and drawings.
As Bernard Tschumi argues, “…There is no architecture without event, no architecture without action, without activity, without function. By extension, there is no architecture without violence”.
The event is the figurative origin of architecture itself, Tschumi writes, through which an architecture of difference and opposition can be proposed rather than synthesis and totality. Narrative techniques—be they pictorial or cinematic—evoke the ability of fiction to operate as an alternative form of critique (Tschumi, 1994). When stating There is no architecture without event, nor without violence, Tschumi refers to violence not as physical brutality but to the inevitable disruption and transformation that occurs when human action intervenes in space. Architecture, in this sense, is never static or neutral: the very activities it hosts introduce tensions, collisions, and reconfigurations that alter its spatial and social order.
The Accident is inseparable from its velocity of unexpected emergence (Virilio 2003)
In Unknown Quantity, Paul Virilio considers accelerated temporality as one in which the unfolding of events is inseparable from, and indeed constituted through, the accidents and opportunities it brings about. Invention, he suggests, is a way of grasping accidents as signs, as opportunities. It is high time to open up to the impromptu, to that indirect production of science that is the disaster, the catastrophe. If according to Aristotle, “the accident reveals the substance, “the invention of the substance is also the invention of the “accident”. (Virilio 2003)
In that manner, the shipwreck is indeed the ‘futuristic’ invention of the ship, the air crash the invention of the supersonic plane, and the Chernobyl meltdown, the invention of the nuclear power station.
Studio Drawing Architecture
Leaning on Tschumi’s Manhattan Transcripts, we will observe and activate a city event into drawings that render the event as a time-based inhabitant of the urban fabric, and subsequently invite the event to intersect with and calibrate the urban fabric into speculative proposals.
We will design architecture as an occurrence in a relational field— between space, movement, and event — rather than as an isolated and static object. Moving beyond the classical imperative of representation, students will develop spatial propositions emerging from encounters between infrastructure and program, between space and occupant, and between objects and the events they stage.
Promiscuous Collisions
When staging and recording a physical site as an experience, we explore and activate qualities and latent opportunities of the urban environment that would otherwise remain concealed. Moreover, when recording and drawing from an individual experiential perspective, the student activates and articulates spatial notions aligned with their own affinities.
Phase 1: Observation & transcription of the event
(a) The event is studied through its physical site, a sequenced spatial narrative, and atmosphere, explored by means of film, photography and collage.
(b) The staged encounter—drawn out.
Mid-term review
Phase 2: Speculative architectural proposition
The drawings, models, visuals and concepts developed in phase 1 will form the basis for a speculative proposition: an architectural project presented through drawings and models.
Image credit: Tschumi, B. 1995. Manhattan Transcripts. ppXXI
Bibliography
Tschumi, Bernard. 1994. The Manhattan Transcripts. London: Academy Editions. (Orig. pub. 1981.) https://issuu.com/cagdaoz/docs/_bernard_tschumi__the_manhattan_tra
Tschumi, Bernard. 1994. Architecture and Disjunction. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
(where Tschumi unpacks the notions of event, space, and violence in several essays).
Viola, Bill. 1998. Reasons for Knocking at an Empty House. London: Thames & Hudson.
Virilio, Paul. 2003. Unknown Quantity. London: Thames & Hudson.
Image credit on front page: Samsara, Screenshot, Ron Fincke (2011), Samsara, which is Sanskrit for “the ever turning wheel of life”.