Fixing the Flow / W(e)AT(h)ER MATTERS
Master dissertation studio 2023-24
Supervisor: Thierry Berlemont
Campus: Brussels
Studio-format with individual proposals
Image © Asako Narahashi
‘Half Awake and Half Asleep in the Water’
Water is primarily phenomenon and process rather than a thing. Its dynamic and transformative nature is the basis for an extensive range of meanings. Depending on the perspective taken it can become
… a source
… a site
… a medium
… a material
… an actant
… a subject
…
Water challenges the sticky ideas of stasis and permanence of architecture, and it confronts our penchant for fixing things and seeing them as discrete and separate rather than related and connected. Water has the capacity to both connect and take apart, solidify and dissolve, deposit and erode. It is a volatile and versatile definer of atmosphere and landscape, threatening and comforting, and supports the questioning of architectural authorship. Water is complicated because besides being a tangible material, it is also symbolic and metaphorical, ecological, cultural, social and political. It is here, there and everywhere, and even its absence does not stay unnoticed and without consequence.
Why then, is water – clean and dirty – so shockingly absent from architectural discourse and production? ‘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)
This thesis-studio fosters the development of aquatic conceptions for architecture. It is still at its beginnings and under construction. Ways of working and more elaborate aims still have to be articulated and will be so during the following weeks and months.
references:
‘What is Water, The History of a Modern Abstraction’, Jamie Linton.
‘Life’s Matrix, A Biography of Water’, Philip Ball
‘Elixir, A History of Water and Humankind’, Brian Fagan.
‘H20 and the Waters of Forgetfulness, Ivan Illich.
‘Water and Art’, David Clarke.
‘Sense of The City, An Alternate Approuch to Urbanism’, Mirko Zardini.
‘Subnature, Architecture’s Other Environments’, David Gissen.
‘Architecture Météorologique’, Philippe Rahm.
‘Another Scale of Architecture’, Junya Ishigami
‘The Earth’s Details’, Hiroshi Sambuichi.
‘Weather Architecture’, Jonathan Hill.
‘On Weathering’, Mohsen Mostafavi and David Leatherbarrow.
‘Water and Dreams’, Gaston Bachelard.
‘Dirty Theory’, Hélène Frichot.
‘Bodies of Water’, Shanghai Biennale & Andres Jaque / Office for Political Innovation.
‘Wet Dreams’, CentroCentro and MAYRIT, the Madrid Biennial of Design and Architecture.
‘FORMAT 2023: Water Expeditions’, Z33
…