This degree of sustainability is an alternative to developed technologies that convey the image of ‘green’ – solar panels for example, as ‘strong form’ sustainability. Thrusting raw materials into the foreground forces us to consider the life cycle of building materials, provoking a new consciousness about how resources are processed and used in architecture. Such landscapes ask people how they should be used; they demand new forms of interaction not only between architecture and subject, but among subjects as well. Only through testing could someone decide which bag in Bag Pile is ergonomically suited for sitting, or even which bag is best to use as a platform to protest the institution itself. Someone else might experiment in Tent Pile to find where the shadows converge, where they feel roofed. Bag Pile ’ s shapes are just alien enough to exclude the social hierarchies implied by most architecture. Visitors necessarily engage in the process of agreeing or arguing with others about how the space should be used, renewing the social contract and engaging in a fundamentally human act. Formlessfinder has been called a formal renegade for good reason. Their strategic retreat from form offers respite from our contemporary saturation in images to reconnect us to the physical and social world.
At a point in time where we are emerging from the totalising narratives of modernism, the tendency is to splinter into many solutions with an attitude that we can do anything. Divergent approaches each pursue their own path, although common across all factions is the reliance on the currencies of image and grand ideas to disseminate their respective wares. In contrast, formlessness identifies the image as its main enemy. Since much of contemporary architecture’s success is related to the proliferation and recognisability of its images, an architecture that subverts the dependence on iconicity must, by definition, work with other qualities than the diagram, unquestioned hierarchies and image. Formlessness is a flexible status and attitude whose fundamental utility is a toolkit of operations for subversion. Piles of rubble as an architectural element challenges existing aesthetic value systems. The project for architecture and society in the twenty-first century is to decide what we should do – a fundamentally political project. The project of the formless is to find moments that allow us to not only think about how to shape architecture but how to question existing hegemonies that have taken hold more broadly. In this sense, the architect is re-positioned as one who resists fully-formed solutions and instead offers moments and spaces where individuals can co-author the culture they inhabit. ~
61
formlessfinder
Made with FlippingBook interactive PDF creator