Author(s): Jack Wu & Andrew Douglas
Of the many techniques for bringing architecture into being, in this paper we emphasise the relatively little considered practice of conversation. The presentation builds on research undertaken in the Masters of Architecture programme at the University of Auckland in 2023. In this research, the key question addressed was how to imagine architectural education and its future differently. The position we assumed was that this difference could not be addressed in singular or solitary ways, but ought to be discursively and collectively constructed. Moreover we proposed that this conversation sharing ought to be multi-generational, in other words, historically inflected while being future-inclined. In the indigenous M膩ori tradition we sit adjacent to, such an idea accords with the practice of whakapapa, or the performing orally of significant genealogical and associational lineages that tie place and people together. Hence, as a cultural practice it sees the future in an anterior sense, carrying forward a backwardly drawn emphasis with deep historical and temporal ties. For our part, we drew on generationally defined pedagogical ties of our School running back from Aotearoa New Zealand to Ireland, and in turn, Scotland where the then groundbreaking work of biologist and early town planner Patrick Geddes established the conditions for imagining discursively and performatively rich conversations between those designing and those designed for. In this paper, we present a project whimsically titled Dandelion Minds, Stories That Make a Room. With it, we will suggest one way architecture can be better conceived of as attaching itself to the diverse worlds it spans. The driving social conviction in the work was the need for conceiving inclusive arenas capable of resonating with, and responding to, multiple voices. Hence, the project imagines itself as a kind of room making鈥攐ne drawing from Louis Kahn鈥檚 exhibition titled City/2 at the Philadelphia Museum of Art (1971-1972). Significantly, we have taken the position that the institutional furnishing of architectural learning has increasingly been given over to generic and formulaic modes of interaction, interaction increasingly restrictive of non-institutional voices. Building on the legacy of Geddes and its revision through previous teachers of architecture at the University of Auckland we have emphasised the doubly-placed dynamic of community interaction鈥攁 here-there approach built around a series of micro-events that generate both residual artefacts and a deepened grasp and invention of place-rhythms from which architecture may better dream.
Volume Editors
ISBN
978-1-944214-49-4