In the context of this project, we were encouraged to reflect collaboratively on the instruments and methods used in the analysis and design of the built environment. We were motivated to test those instruments and methods by confronting them with representational and theoretical precedents, and by relating them to the current day context. We endeavoured to challenge our biases and reflect critically on our theoretical standpoint within architecture.
Our process can be understood chronologically in three acts. During the first weeks of this course, we investigated this detail from various perspectives, in turn as modelling, drawing and writing the detail (ACT 1). As a result of the gathered knowledge of the analysis, a theory developed from our process (ACT 2). The position we formulated based on the theory was tested through making in a final exercise (ACT 3).
ACT I - EXPLORING
We began our journey with a polytechnic exploration of our detail through graphics, models and texts. Each group member searched ways of investigating the detail, these were supplemented with theoretical and graphic references. A trans-disciplinary attitude enabled us to value exercises that were not technically accurate, as they offered us more room for speculation and reconfiguration of the detail.
The detail we studied is the result of our search for a strange detail which we encountered in rural France, near Lyon. Its humility, informality and precarious balance called to us, as we wondered how it had come into being. This work, assembled by an anonymous maker, articulates a wall, roof and gate. The assemblage appeared to us as a spontaneous arrangement of materials that must have been at hand. These consist of mismatched fragments of stone, wood, metal, fibre cement and more. As we realised the detail had probably not been drawn before its construction, we also accepted that its logic of assembly could not be fully rationalised.
Making use of alienation, we collaboratively investigated our detail’s thingness and its most immediate response to elementary needs : the provision of boundary and shelter.
However, the response to these supposedly simple needs resulted in a complexity that could hardly be rationalised. Fueled by the maker’s spontaneity and intuition, the detail materialised itself as a seemingly irrational gathering of items.
Despite or thanks to this heterogeneous nature, the detail seems to belong there, as a product of its circumstances : time, place, and author, as well as his or her skillset and needs. It still bears traces of our anonymous builder, who, acting as both maker and user, trusted their body, mind and materials to build their home.
The detail presents a strong narrative potential in explaining its own making. It hints at the choreographies and tools that transformed mismatched materials into an unfinished montage. As the dance of construction unfolds, patterns and motifs between matter and maker reveal themselves. These series of deliberate actions brought the maker closer to their tools and to the detail itself.
The identification of this disjointed construction process led to the understanding of what followed it, as time took its hold. Every day, it deformed further, unbalanced and stained, contrasting with the alternative construction it might have been in the hands of a more deliberate maker.
Every inaccuracy of the hand and every loose joint becomes a playground for spiders, a nest for birds or the support for a child’s imagination. The accumulation of various layered perceptions speaks of the fertility of this detail in interaction with its direct environment.
Indeed, though disregarded as the backdrop to surrounding life, the assemblage harboured a character of its own. It became a unique cabinet de curiosité, hosting a rich exhibit of life within its hollows : spiders feasting on lost flies, a drop of rain collapsing a determined ant, and a plants’ roots clawing into the wall’s joints.
Need-driven, unrehearsed, bespoke, legible, impermanent, fostering empathy and multiplying affordances… These particular properties are present in both the process and the product of our detail. Once we have synthesised our analysis to the extent to view these characteristics collectively, we realised that they are rarely all simultaneously present in most architecture produced today.
We noticed that we were not the first to observe this contrast between anonymous architecture and the majority of the built environment. Bernard Rudowsky wrote in Architecture without Architects:
Rudowsky's work highlights the under-appreciation of this kind of architecture, and hints at the value of a paradigm shift which could make us benefit from its responsiveness to needs. We concluded that there was much to learn from such architecture.
We identified the culture of our detail as ‘Impromptu architecture.’ From the latin ‘in promptu’ : at hand. In literature, it is used to describe a short improvised poem, inspired by the circumstances its author is directly facing. Through this lense, the detail is read as a spur-of-the-moment construction and a product of its circumstances.
Delving further into impromptu architecture, we discovered the reading ‘Adhocism’ by Charles Jencks, who wrote:
This quote made us recognise two different cultures, and their nuanced distinctions. We also acknowledged that all four of us share a comparable approach to process, references and tools. Our architectural cultures are very similar, even though our education prior to architecture school was quite different. However, our common cultural background and the associated traditions could certainly not have led to the creation of this detail.
ACT II - REFLECTING
Having acknowledged the role of cultures in construction, we took a closer look at how they came into being and what distinguishes them. Mankind at first appropriated materials temporarily to satisfy its fundamental need of shelter and protection. The construction process was need-driven, responsive and instinctive. It was also unrehearsed, driven by tacit knowledge and informed by its context.
However, in time, the scale of settlements increased, and what was initially a DIY pursuit became an industry. Architecture developed to be more planned, mediated, normative, precise and driven by explicit knowledge. This led to the distancing of the maker from the user, and the mind from the hands.
As roles became specialised and the industry was institutionalised, architecture reached a rationalised form of construction which lost its impromptu nature. Today, most of the man-made environment consists of buildings that follow an institutionalised construction process. The designer figure, neither maker nor user, is the agent of change in our environments. Numerous intermediate stages preceding construction, such as the translation into a different medium, were introduced. These became a set of instructions. Architecture started preoccupying itself with an increasing number of peripheral concerns. Those weren’t direct requisites for construction, rather they were needed by the growing industry and corporatisation of the processes.
This systemic shift in construction is outlined in Sibyl Moholynagy’s work. Her ethnographic research resulted in the publication ‘Native Genius in Vernacular Architecture’. She touches here on some contemporary problems of the construction industry, namely the designer’s distancing of the elementary purpose of architecture : providing shelter. While she does polarize between those two cultures, we prefer to nuance this distinction. We view them as cultures whose essence contrasts yet they are not hermetically sealed from each other and both yield great opportunities. Rationalised building enables technological innovation and progress, and is often more thought through, precise, less defective and efficient.
However, the methods employed by the prevalent culture of architecture sometimes lead to unwanted side effects. These can be uniformity, contextual apathy, insensitive environments, image-driven designs and waste of resources and energy.
We wish to query what qualities of impromptu architecture offer to our own culture while identifying the invisible/unconscious limitations of our current analysis and design methods. Rather than simply reflecting, reading and discussing, we aim for recreating this process manually ourselves. Knowing about these biases does not guarantee their understanding.
We therefore would like to propose a method that enables this understanding to occur : after identifying traditions that one has critically reflected on, we suggest a conscious subtraction of those. Undergoing the familiar process with this subtraction highlights the influence of those tools and traditions.
ACT III - PERFORMING
Our process therefore continues with our intention of putting our theory to use by performing following its newfound principles. Our starting point consisted of identifying a genuine, physical need, which would lead to a 1:1 construction experiment. We wanted to create the thing itself, rather than a filtered representation of the thing. We identified key limitations ensuring that the process would be impromptu.
We opened with a simple observation: our context is that of a global pandemic forcing us to study from home, while also requiring us to virtually span numerous borders. Our workspace was entirely virtual, consisting of an endless WhatsApp conversation, a heavy Google drive and countless Zoom meetings. In this context we pondered how we could work together and contribute to a collective piece of Impromptu Architecture.
Contemplating our situation as stranded students, we observed our need for a common physical working space which would break up the monotony of studying in the same place every day. This new study space would provide the opportunity to separate spaces for life from those for study.
The making part of our experiment was crucial. To reduce the mediation between our minds, hands and materials, we deprived ourselves of the tool of drawing. Each of us built their own study space with what was at hand : cardboard, bamboo, timber, masonry, rocks, fabric…
This montage shows our simultaneous building, an unrehearsed performance of four bodies fulfilling the same need, as you see in the following montage.
The multiplicity of our responses made us acknowledge the territorial potential embedded in furniture once augmented with digital technology. It yielded a capacity to bring us all together in a common virtual space. During our reflection on the conventional construction protocol, we encountered the work of Robin Evans who interrogated the role of the architectural drawing.
This tempted us to throw the protocol on its head. Instead of drawing beforehand we drew after our making. Effectively, we drew ‘afterhand’.This tempted us to throw the protocol on its head.
This reverse process highlighted the translation role of drawing which made it difficult to convey the Impromptu characteristics. Effectively, we concluded that the intermediate step of drawing inhibits many of the qualities that make these constructions so remarkable.
The drawing also confirmed to us its fictional power as it allowed us to synthesize our 4 individual wholes into components of a single, collective whole. Drawing digitally also creates a sense of scale-lessness, and this almost parodic drawing, absurd in its composition and technical aspiration produces abstract figures and suggests unexpected relations between objects.
During this process of making without drawing, with the intention of reducing intermediate steps of mediation, we saw what could occur without its influence.This led to the realisation that if we had drawn our study spaces ‘before-hand’, and followed the drawn instructions to the letter, the result would have been entirely different.
CONCLUSION
So what have we learnt? The buildings we will design in the future will most likely be planned, rehearsed, reasoned and mediated. Now we ask ourselves how our encounter with the impromptu will inform our future practice.
We found that architecture evolved from an impromptu practice to an institutionalized one, whose results are limited by unconscious traditions. In ‘the Reflective Practitioner’, Donald Schön wrote that once aware of the affordances and limitations of one’s tools, one becomes able to consciously exploit these processes rather than follow their standardised uses. Relating this to our field, we have observed that a more mindful use of architecture’s traditions may remedy to certain issues in the current built environment and provide new opportunities.
This is exemplified by the many informal changes in the city than have seen the day due to COVID. These DIY measures are impromptu in all of their facets: they are temporary, made with the at-hand, time and cost-effective, and their assembly was anonymous.
This demonstrates that even more so in unpredictable situations of crisis like today, impromptu architecture can increase resilience. Where planned solutions fail, it is more important than ever to make use of what others have produced before us, and to be able to react quickly and meaningfully to it. This sort of productive cultural contamination reminds us of the value in transdisciplinary practices that are aware of their limitations.
We would like to conclude that we are not calling for a dismissal of our current tools, but are suggesting a change of attitude towards the impromptu, inclined to borrow what is at hand. We have both learned about the value of impromptu applied to architecture as well as found new energy to question our biases brought about by our architectural education.
Find below the link to the complete document created at the end of the course.
The report provides an honest record of the process we underwent, and invites the reader to pick up where we left off.
The report provides an honest record of the process we underwent, and invites the reader to pick up where we left off.