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TED talk: Can a building be a person?
Log 30 – Architectural Coexistence: Twins, Logs and the Ecology of Things
© 2013 Scott Rudd www.scottruddevents.com www.scottruddphotography.com
"If Log tends to reflect a show like Twin Peaks more than American Idol, insisting on the very critical reflection that...
Posted by Log on Friday, February 21, 2014
Excerpt from article here: http://www.anycorp.com/anycorp/article/183
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Bartlett lecture: The Creature.
Lecture at the Bartlett School of Architecture on Wednesday, April 24, 2013.
Link
Architecture as a living organism has appeared in various guises across history, with particular intensity through the avant-garde and in relation to utopian projects. This was fed by influential figures such as Sigfried Giedion, who asserted that architecture is an “organism” that “has a life of its own, grows or dwindles, finds new potentialities and forgets them again.” Today, contemporary architectural twists and turns are revisiting the organism through the lens and promise of biotechnologies. Living entities such as bacteria have become employed as building material, and white lab coats have become fashionable attire for the architect on the job.
This presentation by Pia Ednie-Brown, Associate Professor in Architecture at RMIT, will both consider this contemporary situation and discuss an idea of the architectural creature that is not restrained to biological life per se, but to a more transversal, distributed form of life. It will be argued that this notion of ‘the creature’ can become particularly valuable in relation to creative practice research and for approaching architecture in terms of the vitality it can contribute to the world.
AD issue is Out
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Our AD issue is now in print:The Innovation Imperative: Architectures of Vitality, Pia Ednie-Brown, Mark Burry, Andrew Burrow (eds). Architectural Design Profile No 221, H. Castle (series ed), London: Wiley, 2013.
Open Wide, Come Inside
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This morning, my video presentation for the 3rd International Arakawa and Gins Conference was released here: http://ag3.griffith.edu.au/node/13 It works with a series of ideas that are becoming more important in the context of our broader design innovation research project, namely 'open systems', 'play', and 'emergence'. In general, Arakawa and Gins idea of 'reversible destiny' offers ways to rethink approaches to 'futuring'.
Here is the video, on Vimeo, with conference abstract below:
Open Wide, Come Inside: laughter, composure and architectural play. from pia ednie-brown on Vimeo.
This video is a presentation for an academic online conference in March 2010: the 3rd International Arakawa and Gins Architecture and Philosophy Conference. http://ag3.griffith.edu.au
It is the video presentation for the Art and Architecture stream of the conference. The video is composed as a mock episode of the children's TV show, Play School, intersecting with an academic paper.
This is the abstract for the paper:
My video presentation, which I am aiming to land somewhere between a lecture, an intimate confessional, and the pre-school TV show, Play School, is concerned with the way in which Arakawa and Gins have generated an evolving open system, and the mechanisms through which that system elusively hold together despite radical internal disparity. I suggest that this openness is sustained through simultaneously resisting coming to rest or finding explanatory closure, while maintaining a firm grasp on an elusive quality of connection. Turbulence, vitality and incongruity enter co-created loopiness, openly snowballing into a perpetual motion machine. Their buildings are an integral part of this machine, but their architecture is that machine.
But its not really a machine, it’s an organism-person-environment dynamic – a three part cleavage that plaits infinite strands of hairy connection into an open loop. What most arouses my interest, is the performative, transversal nature of their compositional glue – or in other words, what holds this dynamic together, and keeps it rolling. This I try to personify in terms of the architecture of shared laughter. The act of laughing together becomes an affective diagram and embodiment of their notion of bioscleave.
These characteristics of Arakawa and Gins make them exemplary cases of what I describe as ‘ethico-aesthetic know-how’ – or the art of emergence, which at best is a capacity to resonate in a heightened awareness of affectivity amidst all our organism-person-environment engagements. Here, we find a compositional coherence that is dynamically behavioural, something that might be found, say, in the complex of feelings that animate a face into a smile, rather than in the formal arrangement of a smiling face. And from there the question becomes, what can this teach about composing buildings that can laugh along with us?
Where the action is.
Just about everything I've been doing lately is being registered on the other blog:Plastic Futures
SEAM Symposium and 'The Erotic Return'
In September this year, I attended and presented at the SEAM symposium, convened by Samantha Spurr, Margie Medlin, and Benedict Anderson and held at the very lovely venue of Critical Path. This symposium was beautifully crafted and put together with a great deal of care. It was one of those conferences that you remember in terms of generating a feeling of community and enthusiasm for the act of gathering and sharing ideas. A far cry from some others, where it seems more about attaining notches on the refereed conference paper bedhead than a genuine desire to engage. It was, as such, extremely appropriate that Brian Massumi and Erin Manning were keynotes, given that they have a history of convening experimental workshop events that are utterly held together by that kind of generosity, and have not a sniff of referee about them.
I felt very honored to give one of the keynote presentations on Friday, Sept 18th. Brian Massumi and Andrew Benjamin presented on the first night (17th), and myself with Erin Manning on the second night.
My presentation was called ‘The Erotic Return’, where I discussed how states of affective intensity have more to offer the research we do as designers than we have cared to acknowledge. The erotic is a somewhat exemplary category of affective intensity because it’s hard to really think about eroticism without and being aware of feeling, or bodily movements. As George Bataille wrote in his study on the subject: “Eroticism is an experience that cannot be assessed from the outside in the way an object can.”
The tingles and flushes of emerging erotic experience are not usually acknowledged features of a design discourse. Encountering an excruciatingly beautiful drawing might make you tingle, taking you to the verge of an erotic experience, but I shudder to think of the awkward pause that might arise in a social or professional situation should you give voice to your experience of that tingle. What I was trying to convey in the presentation, through some project work examples, was: if we are affected by engaging with, say a creative work, we enter into an even more complex, dynamic, aesthetically driven process when we produce creative work, and that this is a very significant level of awareness for research by creative practice. This argument has strong links to those developed in my PhD ‘The Aesthetics of Emergence‘, but is a development upon it. I hope to work up a paper or three on the connections between emergent research methodology (commonly known as ‘post-design rationalisation’, which I thorough believe is both valid and necessary for creative work), and the erotic (or, what I am calling in a Nietzschian play, ‘The Erotic Return’).