ENIAtype Masterclass, three-day workshop on River Nile, Cairo intervention, 2013
Design Ecologies 2.2: A Sentient Relic
A double edged sword theory – one edge through the dominant ‘theory chic’ of contemporary architecture and the other opening the way for a more dangerous conception of design – a guide, a tool for a cryptic cartography of positioning oneself from within the construction of the design itself.
Humans become the relic in relation to the sentient building.
Design Ecologies 2.2: A Sentient Relic explores strategies and tactics in the deluge of our environmental alterity, through nexuses between ecological, notational, instructional and aesthetical design visions. We are looking for models and speculations for grasping non-anthropocentric as a design methodology and collapse of the natural onto the artificial, all in connection with Design Ecologies. To see in architecture a suspension, a compromise: at the same time that it liberates a tendency towards a synthesis of bifurcations and extrapolations. Architecture as a convoluted plane of tactics and meta-strategies for giving rise to a twisted strain of designing in the built environment engrained with non-anthropocentric, non-local and non-reductionist design systems. Designing may be understood to be an exploration of alternative principles to emergent practical environmental problems. Sentient relics are designs ready to adopt different tactics and strategies between ground and unground as a kind of autopredation.
contributions from:
Stuart Munro
Perry Kulper
Mark West
Tim Matts and Aiden Tynan
Keith Tilford
DEADLINE is approaching at the end of next month for the CFP on Design Ecologies: Chthonic Deluge. Please get in touch is you are going to propose an article. email: info@eniatype.com
With Peter Watts, author of Blindsight, writing the overview article for all contributions in this issue.
FULL ARTICLE In Design Ecologies 2.2: a sentient relic, published through Intellect books.
Ontological pivots
Keith Tilford
Abstract
This article provides a survey of recent projects in the acrylic medium, detailing some of the operative conceptual machinery and genesis of the ideas, with brief reflections on the implications of materials, process and aesthetic choices. It attempts to extract speculative philosophical consequences for approaches to drawing and the possibilities of thinking its act through the concepts of gesture and manipulative abduction as they appear in the work of Gilles Châtelet and Lorenzo Magnani respectively. Beyond this, the article sets up a potential task for thinking art in relation to alienation and estrangement as ineradicable aspects of its procedures, and considers them as liberating rather than constricting mechanisms.
(image by Keith Tilford)
FULL ARTICLE In Design Ecologies 2.2: a sentient relic, published through Intellect books.
Spatial Blooms
Perry Kulper
Abstract
‘Spatial Blooms’ is research by design work undertaken through the generous support of the University of Michigan’s Taubman College ‘Research Through Making’ grant program. This article discusses work that explores the possibility of inscribing indeterminacy and varied temporal logics, borrowed from landscape, into architecture. It foregrounds the possibility of an evolving architecture that stimulates relations that might be generated during its existence- temporally active germinal formations, loaded and ready to go. The design efforts study this potential by using landscape ready-mades- specifically, landscape organizational principles, landscape elements and landscape biologies, and their capacities to engender change, enfolded through design. Ultimately the architecture would facilitate spheres of influence, activated in time. The work trades on the richness of landscapes at cultural, experiential and operational levels, investigating ways in which landscape properties can find their way into architectural speculations. It explores the cross-pollination of the landscape properties into architecture through three specific lenses: analogous thinking as a design method; the use of language prompts to activate design possibilities; the development of graphically deep visualization techniques to evolve the work.
(image by Perry Kulper)
FULL ARTICLE In Design Ecologies 2.2: a sentient relic, published through Intellect books.
Out Of Our Hands- Three Architectural Fantasies for Strange and Sad Ecologies
Mark West
Abstract
Here is a story told through three architectural fantasies, separated by over a quarter century from first to last. The arc of this story is caught in a strong tension between architecture’s essential optimism and certain dystopic social ecologies. Its story draws upon a personal narrative in order to give a figure to our collective imagination of the future and our picture of our place in Nature and how these have altered through 30 years of cultural, technological, (and personal) change. It wants to know what architecture might be called to do and how it might act when caught in a diastolic cultural pulse — a dark groping for beauty in an evolving landscape of difficult imagined futures.
(image of ‘Safehouse’ by Mark West)
*CALL FOR PAPERS*
Design Ecologies 3.1: chthonic deluge
Submission deadline: Thursday 28th February 2013
Peter Watts (author of Blindsight) will write the overview article!!
Design Ecologies 3.1: chthonic deluge present a possible future, images of unprecedented catastrophe and collapse, of certainties and values distorted beyond repair or retrieval, and to craft them with the conviction of the seen; the unseen through the swirling devilish bombardment of objects in a sublime frenzy of forces in the whimpering, emotionally-exhausted wasteland of the twenty first century. Through the hysterical oscillations of implosion and explosion there will be a prophecy of planetary exhumation or ecological deluge.
We have the Canadian science fiction author Peter Watts writing the ideation article in response to the other four articles and case study selected for this issue of Design Ecologies.
Regular updates at: http://designecologies.tumblr.com/
We invite submissions of articles from any discipline to speculate on the formation of your projects/ buildings/ performances as a critical practice that activates our understanding of intuition, inventory and discovery in architecture.
The four areas of interest include:
1. Ecological design visions.
2. Notational design
3. Instructional design visions.
4. Aesthetical design visions
We also welcome case studies and project profiles of 1–5 pages in length
Submissions
Submissions are welcome from both scholars and practitioners. Contributions may be between 3,000 and 7,000 words and should be accessible to the non-specialist reader. Papers must be submitted in English.
Please send all submissions to: shaun@eniatype.com
Design Ecologies 2.1: the ill-defined niche, 2012.
Architecture- one that coerces the participant to focus on the shifting relationship between buildings and environment as the obstacle to their failure.
The articles are written by architects who underpin the failure of the connection between materiality and environment in relation to their own unique practice methodologies. Includes articles by NICK LAND, NAT CHARD, CAMILA E. SOTOMAYOR, TIM MATTS, AIDAN TYNAN and SHAUN MURRAY.
The fraying of ecology into design, through the ‘strategic’ insertion of incompleteness, replaces the ideal of a discoverable archetype with ‘an emerging design theory’ or Eniatype – a learning procedure that is itself under construction. At the limit of absolute consistency, or structural collapse, where signs and substances lose ontological distinctiveness, and the formulation of design is indistinguishable from its implementation, ecologies are populated by ‘complex notational systems’ or nebulous materials: ‘Climate proxies, dust, temperature, precipitation, chemistry and gas composition of [the] lower atmosphere…’. At once clouds of variable density and indices of complex interconnections, such notational markers are stripped of all pretence to rational or representational values that could be separated from the fabrications they enter into, dissolving the preparatory and programmatic status of architectural semiotics into patterns of constructive involvement and artificial perception. Within architecture of the advanced Eniatype, there is no language that is not immediately building material, and no plan that is temporally separable from project development. ‘Architects are the editors of the environment…
Nick Land in Design Ecologies 2.1, 2012 (via eniatype)
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