Experimentation?

RICOCHET3 explores the potential for experimentation at the physical, digital and thinking planes of architecture. Three discussants set the stage for an immersive group interaction on architecture moves and tropes that include touching, viewing the invisible, and laughing; can the scientific genealogy of experimentation be turned on its head or is experimentation already a redundant, but still ‘cool’ concept for architects? Join to debate with discussants Takako Hasegawa, Yorgos Berdos, Katerina Zacharopoulou and organisers John Andrews and Maria Theodorou.

Architecture as movement

While architecture’s physical existence might be perceived permanent, its experience is never static; it is in constant flux in relation to the broad context including changes in time, our body and mind. By firmly bringing back the ‘body’ in conversation, the performative presentation, with Kristina Hertel and Pablo Rimoldi, will question what happens if we, architects, start to move. Will the dynamic dialogue with space lead to an alternative creative process offering yet new experience of space embodying its shift and change?

            Takako Hasegawa AADipl, GradDipl(AA) approaches architecture through choreography, and as choreography. By engaging with movement as an agent for architectural thinking and process, she searches for new ways of articulating and creating architecture and its experience.

CryptoArchitecture

Digital innovation and crowd-based online platforms are drastically affecting domesticity and mobility in cities on a pace that architecture struggles to follow. Blockchain technologies introduce new models for peer-to-peer exchange, governance and ownership in the city. Where does this seemingly weightless digital expansion rest? Is data the new oil? What would that mean to architecture?

Yorgos Berdos DipArch, AAMSc EmTech, PhD Cand UoE is a practicing architect (ARB) and teaching fellow at the University of Edinburgh. His current research revolves around the sharing economy and the understanding of the complex traces that the processes of rapid urbanisation and technological advancement are leaving on the globe. Yorgos’ work often tries to explore ways in which architectural design and thinking are not limited to their prescribed roles.

‘A joke of a building’: Humour as a design tool

Calling a building a joke does not sound exactly like a compliment. Still, there have been architects consciously using humour in their designs. Not surprisingly, such intentions are often rejected as not serious enough, or are hidden behind more elevated terms, like ‘irony’ or ‘satire’. But if humour can function as a tool for communication and a mode of thinking outside the box, is architecture really incompatible with it? And how can humour operate as a platform for experimentation, having a deeper impact than just provoking a laugh?

Katerina Zacharopoulou studied architecture in Greece. After completing the History and Critical Thinking MA at the AA, she is currently an AA History & Theory tutor. Her research revolves around humour in an architectural context, a topic on which she aims to pursue doctoral studies.

The RICOCHET series is a platform for AA Members & alumni to bring works in progress to the school to be put under scrutiny by students and colleagues. Intended as an intensive discussion and exchange of ideas, RICOCHET assembles the AA’s bodies, humours and brains to exercise in the immersive environment of architectural gymnastics. Discussions themes are generated by proposals selected from a pool of submissions to the RICOCHET open calls.