FIXING the FLOW
Master dissertation studio 2025-26
Supervisor: Thierry Berlemont
Campus: Brussels
Studio-format with individual proposals
Language: English
WATER …
something that does rather than is
phenomenon and event, not object or thing
not fixed, ever, not even when it looks like it
always on the move … here, there and everywhere
shapeshifting from this to that … prothean …
always participating in dynamic transformative processes
and even its absence does not stay unnoticed and without consequences
WATER …
possesses an abundance of capacities
it can connect and take apart, solidify and dissolve, deposit and erode.
It is a versatile and volatile definer of atmosphere and landscape,
both threatening and comforting.
It wets, humidifies, evaporates, crystallizes, permeates, fills, leaks, drips, trickles, softens, hardens, congeals, dilutes, shapes, drills, corrodes, bonds, buoys, transports, conducts, reflects, hides, reveals, refracts, diffracts, circulates, depletes, repletes, facilitates, blocks, disrupts, cools, heats, it forms into flows, tides, waves, currents, whirlpools, pools, drops, streams, oceans, ….
WATER …
is complicated
both tangible and imperceptible; generative and destructive; ethereal and eerie; healing, cleansing, soothing and distressing; symbolic and metaphorical; ecological, cultural, social and political.
mysterious, unusual, weird, strange, counterintuitive, inexplicable, and queer.
… source
… site
… medium
… material
… resource
… tool
… actant
… subject
… climatic
WATER …
challenges the sticky ideas of stasis and permanence that pervade architecture, and confronts our penchant for fixing things and for seeing them as discrete and separate, rather than related and connected; hence ‘Fixing the Flow’; the mixture of a resolute critique of architecture’s pervasive propensity to stop the movement and kill time, with an ensuing affirmation of a will to restore/repair/fix the flow in one way or another.
WATER -clean and dirty- is either shockingly absent from architectural discourse and production, or when actually taken into consideration it is romanticised or demonised, reduced to a fraction of what it offers and affords.
‘Certainly, water is among the least cooperative of things when it comes to being contained in words and in deeds. Water is what we make of it, but it seldom stays that way for long. When we do contrive to slow down the flow for long enough to substantiate it in language, represent it in numbers, or confine it in Euclidian spaces, water transforms and slips into impermanence; reservoirs rise and fall, winter comes along and the stuff turns to ice, sublimates, and gets spirited away on the first available breeze. Even H2O, that pregnant compound that emerged from the eighteenth-century laboratory of French chemist Antoine Lavoisier is shockingly promiscuous – it goes and bonds with practically everything once it escapes the lab’ (Linton 2010, p.4).
CONTEXT
The studio and the way in which architecture is addressed, is grounded in the engagement Mediating Tactics and the aims articulated in its mission statement are also general aims for this studio.
In order to start this studio and get acquainted with the thinking and approaches that support it, some preliminary reading is advisable. Following non exhaustive list contains some of those that one cannot do without.
The overview is organised alphabetically and does not express hierarchy in any way. Relevant extracts will be provided as pdf, and the list will be expanded gradually.
Jane BENNETT
‘Vibrant Matter, a political ecology of things’ 2010.
Hélène FRICHOT
‘How to Make Yourself a Feminist Design Power Tool’ 2016 & ‘Dirty Theory’ 2019.
David GISSEN
‘Subnature, Architecture’s Other Environments’.
Bruno LATOUR and Albena YANEVA
‘Give Me a Gun and I Will Make All Buildings Move: An ANT’s View of Architecture’ 2008
Ursula K. LE GUIN
‘The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction’ 1988
Jane RENDELL and Pamela WELLS
‘the place of prepositions: a space inhabited by angels’ 2001
Nicholas RESCHER
‘Process Philosophy, A Survey of Basic Issues’ 2000
Zoë SOFIA
‘Container Technologies’ 2000
Jeremy TILL
‘Architecture Depends’ 2009
EXPECTATIONS
1_You are asked to make a contribution to the development of aquatic conceptions for architecture.
2_Water will have to be granted an active role, and cannot be reduced to a symbolic referent.
3_Your response will have to reside in both an individual/personal positioning and a shared positioning with and for the whole group. The collective positioning will also involve some kind of collaborative manifesto and the curation/conception of the way in which all the works are organised together for the final review.
4_You will have to design/develop/conceive your project in terms of process rather than merely focussing on one instance of fixed form/object.
The most important feature of objects [i.e. fixed form] is, by definition, their constancy with respect to certain cognitive actions. The concept of a process, on the contrary, represents an ongoing change.
‘A process is an actual or possible occurrence that consists of an integrated series of connected developments unfolding in programmatic coordination: an orchestrated series of occurrences that are systematically linked to one another either causally or functionally.
A process by its very nature passes on to the future a construction made of the materials of the past. All processes have a developmental, forward looking aspect. Each such process envisions some sector of the future and canalises it into regions of possibility more restrained in range than would otherwise, in theory, be available. The inherent futurition of process is an exfoliation of the real by successively actualising possibilities that are subsequently left behind as the process unfolds.
Processes develop over time: any particular process combines existence in the present with tentacles that reach into the past and the future. Just as there can be no instantaneous vibration or drought, so there is no instantaneous process. Moreover, processes will always involve a variety of subordinate process and events’ (Rescher 2000, pp.22-23).
5_For a participation in this studio, knowledge (and preferably a certain degree of mastery) of multiple media, architectural construction/technique/technology and both theory and philosophy are recommended, and considered a basic set of tools. This preferably goes together with an open inquisitive mind, curiosity, a fearless experimental attitude (with a capacity to put yourself at risk somehow by leaving the usually trodden paths behind), and a will to use design and making as primary tools for enquiry.
6_A genuine dedication towards others, and a will to learn together are expected. This means that you will be asked to share the invaluable knowledge and (life-)experience you already acquired, and to generously put it at the disposal of everyone else involved in the studio.
- Find here the studio description as pdf.
The bottles in All the Sea ( Tania KOVATS 2012-14) seem insignificant at first, austere even. They resemble relics from a Victorian laboratory or, with their various shapes and sizes, a perfumery. Each contains simply water. It is soon clear that simply is an inadequate term. Kovats has assembled the collection from a global cast of contributors. In 365 bottles, there is water from across the planet’s latitude and longitude. The source locations are a poetic litany in themselves: the Mer d’Iroise, the Thracian, Laptev, Timor, Ionian, Savu, Molucca, Aral and Caspian seas. At times, cultural and historical references spring to mind (Bismarck, Sargasso, Galilee, South China). At other times, the intrigue is down to the obscurity involved (Chukchi, Visayan, King Haakon VII), at least to a viewer more familiar with the seas of north-west Europe. In the glass vessels there is nothing then but water, but Kovats invites us to examine this nothing and find in it a protean mass. There will be the microscopic ingredients and pollution unique to various parts of the world. There will be the associated mythology and folklore of each sampled place. There are also the stories behind who sent the samples, when, from where and how. When we follow the contexts, each bottle contains things which are immeasurable. And yet, they contain nothing more than seawater.
source: studiointernational.com/tania-kovats-oceans