imagination Architecture can sometimes support the imagination, through materials or shapes inviting dreams to be more real and giving physicality to poetry. It plays with our senses, and our ideas about what buildings should be. I think that the idea of ‘materials and shapes inviting dreams to be more real’ is wonderful. It makes me think of a collage by Jacques Simon (French landscape architect) showing a photo of a kid balancing on some bollards with a thought bubble of mountain peaks sketched and pasted onto it. Yes! Materials and shapes can summon sensations or memories. In opening this door, they enable architecture to be experienced in ways unique for each person, who will create their own creative and sensory links. Thinking of my own experiences, I can consciously see that I love the Barbican interior spaces and Zumthor’s thermal baths for their womb/ grotto-like character. Or that wooden buildings make me go back inside my grandfather’s carpentry workshop. Or that sitting in a high-up window is like disappearing in a den. A window seat with a view is one of my favourite types of places and I spent a lot of my childhood sitting on my bedroom windowsill watching the world (mostly birds and the odd car) go by. combativeness Nowadays, architectural practice is sometimes reduced to the point of absurdity, to the management of a juxtaposition of different areas of expertise framed by technical and legislative issues. On the fringes of the conventional mode of exercise, however, emerges a multitude of relentlessly creative, inventive, and original practices, as if the force of human invention, so constrained on one side, inevitably resurges on the other. A powerful illustration of this position can be seen in architectural activism which defies authority by diverting or hijacking official rules. Combativeness also refers to the idea of sparring, of exchanging, of having good-natured arguments. While I’m not sure we will start arguing in these pages, I like the idea of bouncing off one another. And is this not at the heart of many people’s creative processes? So many architectural practices are led by a pair. Often with quite different identities and approaches. Coming up with ideas, developing them, communicating them… these processes can operate via visual media - drawing, image making, model making… but also via language, spoken or written. Different individuals have different aptitudes and inclinations. Is establishing some kind of method the first creative act? Imagining the rules and boundaries of a game that allows for creativity and invention? One of my old tutors in architecture school, who ran a practice with his wife, said that they would make a series of quick models and drawings independently of each other, to a given deadline, before
showing each other their ideas and attempting to combine them or choose between them. They would then repeat this process several times as the project developed: making - talking - making - talking. In an interview, 2 Sarah Wigglesworth described how she and Jeremy Till worked on the early stages of designing Stock Orchard Street (their home and workspace, completed in 2001) ‘... we’re two architects… and as you know, there’s kind of, a bit of competition between architects about how you work together (...) who puts marks on the page and stuff like that, so we made a rule that we would only talk about it, we wouldn’t draw anything at all...” In another interview, 3 she explains the process further. “I think one of the things we were trying to explore there was the idea of authorship, and we wanted to both claim authorship… and the problem is, when one of puts something down on paper, they tend to start claiming it, and if we were going to have a kind of equal relationship in what we did there, then that’s a bad idea, so we’re just going to fantasise about it. So we actually spent about four years just talking about it! And dreaming about what it could be like… you know, silly ideas like ‘oh it’s going to be up on stilts, or oh I really like this building by x or y, or, I want a tower because I want a place of dreams… (...) and eventually, I think the agenda about living and working, about these two separate buildings which were joined but separate… it all just began to fall into place… (...) I think it was very fully formed as a set of ideas before it got put on paper, and I think that’s very important if you want to both have a say in it.’ This idea of dialogue and combativeness makes me think of the Antepavillion project conducted in London-Hackney, which aims to fight gentrification in favour of affordable artists and community spaces. 4 Since 2017, through yearly architecture projects, the traditional way of producing architecture has been challenged, in terms of functions, shapes, material sourcing and building standards. There is a dimension of fun, creativity and playfulness in each single pavilion. As it happened, the borough authority itself felt challenged, and each pavilion is now the very tool of a creative and inventive fight between the rigidity of this institution and what a playful architecture practice could be. Play can be seen as an inherent act of rebellion. When the freedom conveyed by play is so close to anarchism, combativeness puts into question the position of architecture in relation to authority and institutions. I believe it is there, in that very context, that architecture can be questioned and reinvented in a meaningful way.
2 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c-3Vx9KrfTQ accessed 12.01.2024 3 https://materialmatters.design/Sarah-Wigglesworth accessed 12.01.2024 4 https://www.antepavilion.org/ accessed 12.01.2024
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on site review 44 : play ©
Oldham+Queney
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