Week 9 Interim Review
Overview
Collect & Purge: Urban transformations with loose space and relationships
Key themes
- Collecting & Purging : acts that demonstrate relationships and interactions between human, non-human and space.
- Relationships: becoming starting points for investigation and proposition.
- Looseness: the spatial condition the project is situating itself.
- (overarching theme of transformation/change)
The project investigates ‘collecting’ and ‘purging’ as acts of transformation of space; critiquing the process of these acts sets a the project up to test characteristics of ‘collecting’ as a design approach and social approach for interventions. Spatially, it is operating in ‘loose space’ – locations where activities and infrastructures blur into each other (anti-infrastructure). In these low-definition spaces it aims to test advantages of ‘looseness’, and its spatial quality that makes it open to interpretation and change (physical and perception). Importantly, the project proposes that changes in space and autonomy rely on the relationships and agencies living / being / working within it; each element within it is invisibly tied to eachother and mediated by each other.
The project has developed to advocate the meaningfulness achieved through the process of collecting, and test how this process can be input into design methodology to aim for meaningful outcomes.
Current Investigations
The project is currently investigating breaking down concept of ‘collecting‘ as a process and characteristics through analysing exercises of collecting stones as part of the developing intervention. The findings are tested through the design process, which is still being expanded. The characteristics pulled together so far include: it takes time, it starts small and slowly grows, involves a process of sorting (categorising), the elements of it have a relationship with each other and their curator(s).
The relationships that invigorate / mediate agencies between ‘things’ (non-human, human, space) is being investigated and tested; using drawings of relationship lines as points / moments for opportunity and propositional starting points.
The advantages of operating in ‘looseness’ is continuely tested through a series of developing / growing activities; interchanging objects, people and use occupying it.
Using ideas from collecting to implement a time-conscious intervention. Currently the project is testing a strategy of using weekly activities that build upon each other each time, and ideally: the intervention grows, social encounters increase, awareness of activity spreads, agency / relationship of the space and trust between architect + professor and the participants strengthens (becoming familiar faces).
Gaps and Challenges
- Project is focussed on one location, the developing methodology needs to think wider and be tested other significant locations. There may be a need to apply the concept of collecting in order to select what constitutes as another significant space.
- Refining the concept of ‘collecting’ – which needs a piece of work illustrating how this has developed from the excercise of collecting stones, and how the process could be applied to other aspects of the project (design approach/social approach).
- What autonomy is in play across different moments in the project? Think about the strategy of slowly collecting trust (architect + professor + residents) and consider how autonomy is also collecting in a similar way with each week and each activity. (Wondering how autonomous something can be when involved in a relationship).
- Can easily become confusing with the different themes weaving in and out of the project, how to set these out clearer without my explanation is also a challenge.
Infrastructures of Autonomy 