TEXTING ARCHITECTS
How do we learn in the digital? How do we deal with the abundance of data? How do we experience spectrums and not be seduced by explicit singular definitions? Does playing with information help?
Lets take architectural discourse as a field of interest, and send questions to prominent architects, experts, and professors?
Let’s start with What is architecture?
With a bit of luck, we will get some interesting ideas, concepts, and stories, yet in most cases there exists a certain worldview of what architecture is. Which is great, but what if our access to answers could be multiplied or exponentially raised by 100, 1000, 10,000? Now we enter the plenty of the digital, where we suddenly have a multitude of answers, stories, ideas and concepts all inhabiting a spectrum – stemming from this single question. From this position of plenty, we have the freedom to see the answer of “what is architecture?“ from different positions, encouraging us to articulate our own. Imagine if every time you asked a question, 100 or 1000 prominent people from the field could answer. The result would provide a broader specturm than a single expert’s answer and be also much more specific than a generic list of answers from google. It would be a beautiful start from the abundant ‘middle’.
The Scenario is simple:
100 contemporary architects = 100 of their texts, blogs and interviews
10 questions = 10 most frequent words in architectural discourse
We are texting with 100 prominent architects – sending them SMSes. The architects are out of context, so are their sentences. They are replying, but at the same time, they are unaware of the action. If they have something to say, they will write back. Consistency is in the spectrum.
Lets ask: What is architecture?, What is space?, What is a project?, What is a City?, What is design?, What is a house? What is Time?,..
What do we get back? A spectrum of answers. Each time we ask a different arrangement appears. Sometimes they contrast each other. For example, texts in a library can be organized in many different ways, they can inhabit a multitude of diverse spectrums depending how one arranges and encodes them. Our spectrums consist of prominent architects, each described by his thoughts on the question, as well as by a graph of words that relate to the question, and by images from google image search.
Lets explore and enjoy the richness of those articulations:
This research project was developed at the Chair for Computer Aided Architectural Design, Department for Architecture, ETH Zürich by Miro Roman in collaboration with Diana Alvarez Marin. More on research of CAAD ETH can be found here.