This delay prompts an armature that allows a reclamation of the chora . The armature may manifest itself in physical form or may assert its influence through an action or the subversive revealing of information. This armature calls attention to the artefact (causing the delay or slowness), letting it take its next breath, all the while still cognisant of its former state, both being and being invisible. A designer can be handed any set of criteria (program, site, material, budget, politics, ambitions) and must be able to strategically think and respond based on the parameters of examination and an understanding of the systemic processes at work. One must understand the interconnected nature of decision and action and the causality that brings. It is through a refocused thinking, a deliberate slowness, that one is able to understand the slippages that are necessary to create work. Whether they are construction tolerances, program adjacencies and overlap, zoning parameters, political agendas or migration patterns, one learns how to establish these slippages through an understanding of the capacity of the chora . Through this process we can move beyond representation and intention, language and style, and develop a way of thinking that creates agency and opportunity for emergence. The twist in a 2 x 4, the fatigue point in steel, the minimal surface, the gerrymandering of political boundaries, economic edges, the grey space of policy and other conditions, when when examined with slowness, shows us how material research can shape and inform more than just material choice. It becomes a way to examine the condition we find ourselves in. It establishes investigation within a systemic context and focuses us on any project's latent potential. One is no longer able to draw a line without understanding that it has weight, is subject to both gravity and time, is interconnected to the larger systemic global organisation and is never innocent.
In the relationship between the material and a situation or event, I seek to measure, calibrate and develop hypotheses. The work is more than seeing, it reveals and understands those things that are buried; it is a process of excavation. In being deliberately slow I seek to understand and make a real time iterative process based on delay to create feedback loops. Intentional slowness makes space that can be democratic, giving agency to those who may not have a voice, or more importantly, identifying those that should be included in the chora. Urgency and speed is needed for critical issues of global warming, rising sea levels, global poverty and inequity. However there must also be a slow down in other ways without delaying critical attention to these crises. We must find a space where we can be deliberate about our pace. A space where we can take a continuous long view, allowing for reflection and analysis at the same time as implementation. Being deliberately slow gives a new agency to design and reframes the capacity of how becoming enters the chora . Slowness reveals those things that we cannot see at our current pace. Within this slow space we can determine a strategy for intervention, moving away from the 'solving' and 'improving' that has put us in our current condition. p
This investigation into the poché of the very familiar, takes an eight foot 2 x 4 as its subject. Through a process of sectioning the found object, one is allowed to travel through the thick space below the surface revealing organic desires within the orthogonal framework of our world. This study cut the 2 x 4 by the width of the saw blade leaving only the sawdust. Each cut was inked to produce a print revealing the fingerprint of the tree.
https://vimeo.com/36228278
Bradford Watson is an architect and assistant professor at the School of Architecture at Montana State University in Boseman. http://www.bradfordawatson.com/
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on site review 41 :: infrastructure
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