Dandelion minds, stories that make a room.

Abstract

This research is concerned with how architectural practices may be more responsive to the collectives it interacts with and designs for, particularly urban social collectives. Of the many techniques architecture brings to bear in the evolving of built environments, the research emphasises the role conversation plays and how an attentiveness to this in literal and figurative senses many make apparent architectural pathways and modes of imagining otherwise occluded by aspects of educational and professional norms. The research pursues the proposition that dreaming (in the sense of envisaging alternatives worlds and modes of inhabitation) has a politics, and that this is often misrecognised or undervalued in the pursuit of image-ready architectural ‘product’ and personae amenable to the media circuits and promotional machinery that determine so much of educational and professional aspiration in architecture. This is a broad and complex field to investigate and critique, and so to simplify, the research has turned to a domain more readily aligned with the process of architectural production - collective interaction and conversation as a mode for determining and reorientating matters of concern in architectural making. Commencing with Thomas Cole’s “The Architect’s Dream” (1840) - a vision that sets in play a particular way of framing architectural ambition – the research asks what does such an image cut out of the picture? This has led to a dense consideration of how the arenas of conversation, specifically ‘the room’, may be conceived of as integral to the framing of forms of consciousness necessary to the conceiving of built environments. Louis Kahn’s images for an exhibition titled “Architecture comes from a Making of a Room” 1971 and his speech from the same occasion, “The Room, the Street, and the City”, has established key reference points for the creative research-making that has defined this research.Drawing on a range of other thinkers and creative makers (Eve Sedgwick, Gilles Deleuze, Massimo Scolari, Derek Jarman, Jeremy Till, Wolfgang Tillmans, Donald Winnicott), and linking these to architectural education traditions stemming from architectural pedagogy at the School of Architecture & Planning, University of Auckland (Andrew Douglas, John Dickson, Richard Toy and Patrick Geddes), the project pursues the making of conversational arenas or rooms pre-empted by a public participatory event. The practices enacted through the research include making social, site-specific-response, and the forming of installation objects, furniture, and settings. Overall, the research enacts an orientation informed by a concern for culturally diverse and queer inflected perspectives.