Site of autonomous connection

The symposium aims at creating a place for sharing and discussion on research in architecture and urbanism, artistic practice and studio pedagogy. It does so by reflecting upon epistemological and cognitive strategies and tools used in understanding and shaping our space, from the immediate human body and its extensions to the territory. As such, the symposium proposes to explore theoretical, practical and ethical connections that link our ways-of-knowing with the ways-of-doing to be desired for a common future.

Staging Places as Performances: Creative Strategies for Architecture, 2008

This thesis is about creative strategies for staging places as performances. To remain viable in the rapidly changing technological and social context, architecture needs to extend its engagement with research, reappraise its fundamental goals and develop creative strategies adequate to new challenges. However, utilisation of research in design disciplines is still immature and the methodologies of this utilisation remain a matter of controversy and active debate. In particular, the potential of cross-pollination between designing and research requires further clarification. This thesis addresses this need by developing a methodological approach that combines participant observation and investigative designing. Utilising these methodologies, this thesis considers several case-studies, including interactive installations and virtual environments. Engagement with case-studies through participant observation and investigative designing in this thesis motivates a discussion that reinstates place as the focus of architectural practice. Existing discourse and practice in architecture often assume retrograde, romantic, essentialist and exclusionary understandings of places, for example as singular, bounded and static. By contrast, this thesis highlights an open and flexible vision of places as performances. Considering the possible roles of architectural designing in place-making, it suggests that architects cannot produce ready places but can engender placemaking performances and influence their growth with provocative, open and collaborative creative-design strategies. Having established the case for distributed, polyphonic, campaigning creativity in place-making, this thesis considers whether design computing can support its performative needs. Commonly, researchers and practitioners in architecture express concerns that design computing can hinder human creativity. By contrast, this thesis demonstrates that design computing can support distributed creativity by staging multiplicious, open, flexible, idea- and insight-generating participatory exchanges. In the process, this thesis considers interactive cinematography and procedural designing as place-making actions. This re-conceptualization demonstrates that design computing can usefully support creative place-making and sometimes be indispensable for its success. This thesis contributes to knowing by 1) utilising and presenting an unorthodox methodological approach to architectural research; 2) presenting an approach to understanding and making of places novel to the field of architecture; and 3) re-conceptualizing innovative design-computing as an important creative resource for placemaking.

ARCHITECTURAE ET ARTIBUS, 2021

In the era of rapid development of digital technologies, designers are faced with the challenge of incorporating the tools of the virtual world into the physical world. The widespread use of new media in design makes it possible to create environments that influence human experience. One of the design methods that have influenced human feelings for several decades is Experience Design - an extremely versatile, immersive method, creating exhibition environments, commercial spaces, urban interiors, and virtual worlds of games, applications and websites. This paper aims to present a design process and effect of an experimental, innovative academic program of semester course “Immersive environments and interactivity in designing architectural interiors and their surroundings”1 Moreover, the author’s didactic intention is to present the application of modern digital technologies in urban space design. Gathering the knowledge about the experience design method and its tool - the experienc...

Frontiers in Psychology

Drawing on the work of artists, photographers, filmmakers, landscape architects and others, a studio teaching pedagogy was developed to investigate the ways that different artistic disciplines see and represent leftover urban spaces. An important aspect of this approach was the simultaneous engagement of students with multiple venues for exploration both inside and outside the studio. A series of interrelated projects and events-architecture studio, symposium, exhibitions of relevant student and symposium participant design work,

VaroomLab Journal Issue Two: Spatialising Illustration, 2013

A dialectogram is an invented, slightly tongue-in-cheek word combining ‘diagram’ with ‘dialect’ or ‘dialectic’ to describe large, detailed drawings of places in Glasgow. The drawings use ethnographic methods to collate personal narratives, local knowledge, feelings and imaginings about place, to create a unique social and aesthetic document. The dialectogram has been used to create documentary illustrations of the Red Road Flats as part of the Red Road Cultural project (now acquired by the People’s Palace Museum), and to record the living arrangements of the travelling showpeople of Glasgow’s East end (Fig. 1, 2). The DRAW DUKE STREET residency (Market Gallery, 30th of October to the 16th of December) was the first of a series of case study dialectograms for my PhD. These case studies centre on locations that are; in deprived and marginal areas; ‘hidden’ from public view or; are in a state of transition.

This paper investigates the diversity of design/humanities through the designer’s role in the urban context. Public space, not only as physical territory, but also as relational and social space, is a potential field of action for the designer humanist. In urban systems, today the core of the debate regarding smart cities, not only involves more technical requirements, system interactions and new technologies, but also those activities related to knowledge and culture, to imagination and talent. It means to re-activate the city, set connections between best practices for the city, starting from its inhabitants, activating a chain reaction, fed through a system of actions at different levels. This paper analyses two kinds of experiences and defines two different professional figures in line with the session’s quest. The urban context, potentially a living hypertext, represents the ideal scenario to experiment the relationship between project and human behaviour and where design fulfills its different roles as a mediator of identities.

New Zealand Journal of Educational Studies

This article synthesises longitudinal deliberations between two architects and an educator, seeking common ground about learning spaces in schools. As the impetus for new and refurbished school buildings continues in New Zealand, it is timely to unpack instinctual disciplinary practices to better understand space and place in schools. We undertook a process of 'bumping' ideas against one another, establishing intersections around the nature of physical spaces created, inhabited, appropriated and used for educational purposes. The process of documenting our deliberations was dialogic and autoethnographic. Through interrogating ideas about space and place in literature and images, we explored how classrooms function for teaching and learning, and opportunities for both intimate and social learning and teaching. We sought to clarify how architects translate ideas about flexible learning, collaboration and whole class teaching into the design of schools and classrooms. We shared knowledge about pedagogy and architecture, and from these iterative dialogic practices, we offer ideas about educational spaces and places from those positions. As disciplinary professionals, we had internalised so much knowledge and expertise within our own fields,we realised that articulating it to others can be a struggle. We have shared the crafting of this article to partially compensate for misplacing the words to express how and why we do what we do in our own practices. We believe that it matters not only that learning spaces are designed well, but also that architects and educators can talk with rather than past each other.

2015

The paper focuses on an example of the fragile balance between theory and practice within the space-place debate. Thus, the introduction outlines several theoretical constructs, which offer a broad view of the complex phenomenon of the space-place study. The article then concentrates on the experiment proposed by the Serpentine Gallery, in London, which is unique in this context. Consequently, this part of Kensington Gardens has transformed itself, little by little, into a genuine architectural laboratory, which analyses and exhibits the attitude towards the space-place relationship, as it is understood by the different starchitects who have built here.

PhD Yearbook 2016, 2016