Saturday 13 December 2014

CALL FOR PRESENTERS - SESSION #2

CALL FOR PRESENTERS - SESSION #2

Session Theme: Un-Thinking Mixed
The term “mixed” has become synonymous with “good urbanism”. Yet, the term "mixed" is often not explored beyond the obvious. In town planning and architecture, “mixed” usually denotes two or more adjacent land-uses or modes of occupation that do not disrupt each other. It is adjacency rather than mixed as in forces being intermingled to create something new. The prosaic "mixed" is un-mixed. As Slavoj Žižek wrote, “Today’s liberal tolerance towards others, the respect of otherness and openness towards it, is counterpointed by an obsessive fear of harassment.” In this, the conventional mindset of separating out different noise, smells, socio-economies and cultural groups remained intact.

We invite presenters to unthink and rethink the term “mixed”, to question the unmixed within the celebrated “mixed”. To speculate and experiment with ways in which smells, sounds, and socio-cultural functions, and importantly persons, can exchange territorial grounds so that “mixed” may be founded in equity and dialogue rather than adjacencies in strata.

Curation Outline
Two to three presentations per session (approx. 20 to 40 minutes each). Format may include:
  • Papers exploring and extracting philosophical themes from existing/proposed design and/or policies
  • Structured Workshops with participants breaking into groups to discuss and present their own findings on the session’s theme
  • Combination of the above
Venue
To keep the dialogue-nature of these sessions, the sessions can be held on the weekends/ evenings at:
  • Pubs/ cafes (quieter ones though)
  • Academic Institutions’ small meeting rooms
  • A firm’s meeting room
Website
facebook.com/archosophyvancouver
archosophy-vancouver.blogspot.ca

Contact





Tuesday 11 November 2014

CALL FOR PRESENTERS

Programme Description
The Archosophy Sessions are an ongoing informal event, endorsed by Vancouver's emerging urban thinking-acting collective, Urbanarium.  They are moments where/when philosophy becomes woven together with architecture, landscape architecture, urban planning, geography and the many spatial practices sitting between these 'big' disciplines. It is to extract the sophia of architecture and design, and to extract the architectonics of philosophy - hence Archo-sophy.

Philosophical questions will be asked of the spatial practices, and spatial questions will be asked of philosophy. Philosophy becomes spatial; spatial practices reveal their philosophical dimension. These sessions will take place monthly at different venues across Vancouver.

In terms of education value, this is an opportunity for practitioners, academics and students to present, in an informal setting, their explorations on the varied spatial, socio-cultural, economic, human and non-human relations that constitute city-building. Each session may start with a brief presentation on range of topics (critiques of capitalism, staging post-colonial interventions, debating religious- and science-biases, finding the ethical in the moral, etc) to spark lively dialogues on dynamic, intelligent and progressive city-building and city-thinking.


Venue
The sessions are held on the weekends/ evenings, approximately every other month at:
  • Cafes (and other semi-public spaces)
  • Academic Institutions meeting rooms (e.g. UBC, SFU, ECUAD, etc.)
  • Design firm meeting room
Location for each session will be announced via email and social media.


Curation Outline
 With regards to time limit and dialogue, we will have two to three presentations per session, approximately 10 to 20 minutes each. The presentations can take the form of:


  • Short papers tying a philosophical theme to the built environment
  • Slideshows outlining design and/or policy works in relation to a philosophical theme
  • Workshops where the participants break into groups to debate how a philosophical theme might explicate the built environment
  • Combination of the above

Contact
archosophyvancouver@gmail.com
facebook.com/archosophyvancouver

This series is affiliated with the Urbanarium.



Welcome to an Un-Thinking of Datum Lines

This article serves as an introduction to the Archosophy Sessions that are to begin in Vancouver, Canada, in late 2014.

This article and these sessions is aimed to explicate the thinking that occurs during spatial design-ing, and the space-ing of philosophy. It is hence about how architecture (and any of the spatial arts) produces sophia - Archosophy.

Un-Think Datum Lines
Designers have always sought to explain what makes their practice or beloved city tick. The explanation often comes in the form of rules and principles. Within the Western canon, there is Hippodamus’ grid to organise life, Vitruvius’ De Architectura to instruct the right proportions for buildings, Le Corbusier’s house as a machine for living, Charles Jencks’ seeming praise for Robert Venturi’s “Less is Bore”, Rem Koolhaas and Bruce Maus’ reverential scepticism for capital, and more recently Jan Gehl’s return to the human scale.

Each of the rules and dictums listed above envision itself to be the best approach to design by constructing a datum line or model for practice. But, philosophy aims to do something different. Rather than gauging how close or far a house or site plan gets to a standard model, philosophy is about creating new knowledge. Rather than drawing datum lines, we can draw concepts from post-colonialism, biology, ethics to even cybernetics to draw a working path for our disciplines to un-think themselves.

From Know-How to Know-Why
We designers are surely capable of producing results that win our clients’ praises. We know how to employ certain typologies and rules of thumb that had worked before to meet certain criteria.[1] We do not begin to question why those particular modes of operation and political-ideological frameworks are chosen; we do not unpack those criteria asked of us. We simply know how to do it, without knowing why. 

To un-think is to really think, to challenge ourselves. It is moving toward knowing why we do what we do. But what is even more critical than “knowing why” is that by doing so we may be more able to assess and devise ways to change our mode of operation. This in turn can change the environment we inhabit.

In knowing why, we can adapt and change, hence building greater resiliency, not just for our mental ecologies but also the social and physical ecologies.

Body of the City
The saying that a design must stand on its own without recourse to an explanatory text is commonly heard. The statement is trite today but nonetheless there is something interesting here. On one hand, this statement seems to suggest design does not need to be secondary to philosophy. On the other hand, we must also recognise design does not supersede philosophy. It is not to privilege action over words, or vice versa. Rather it is to approach the act of philosophising exists in the same space-time as design-ing.[2]

If philosophy and design exist within the same space-time, perhaps it is possible to treat philosophy as not standing above the city to prescribe what the city was or what it must become. Philosophy is always in the time of the city, never before or after the time of the city. Hence, the city has a changing body that no philosophical text can wholly grasp. The body of the city is composed of buildings, parks, plazas, neighbourhoods, artworks and philosophical texts in a busy interplay with each other, always cultivating new ways to express democracies, identities and communities.

To say that philosophy (or “theory”, philosophy’s more operationalisable form) can no longer survey a city from above or reduce the city to a set of replicable codes can be a source of anxiousness for many designers. The contribution philosophy as a field has for design is less so to generalise some notable urban design or architectural moments (like the High Line) into best practices that can be transplanted elsewhere. Its contribution is to actually tempt us to follow the sometimes unclear, tangled lines that cry anxious uncertainties, and then invent new connections between these lines to form new concepts. From this angle, uncertainty attests to a city’s dynamism – a city that constantly moves away from itself; reinventing even its most liberal by-laws, guidelines and standards. Uncertainties are what drive us to want to discover and add to the city’s body.

Design-ing is Philosophising
A former professor of mine, Leon van Schaik, asked this question, “What does a physicist do?” The answer is simply “physics”. “A physicist does physics”, he said. Physicists do not do a philosophy of physics. In inventing new formulas and problems the physicist is creating physics concepts. Leon argued that an architect, likewise, does not do a philosophy of architecture. What Leon is getting at here is that the philosophical act is already in our design practice. He is also suggesting that through design one might be able to come up with new concepts. The production of concepts is not restricted to the realm of writing only.

The philosophical act is in design because the practice of design encompasses the act of drawing, reading, writing, research, postulations, production, review, etc. More importantly, the practice of design is also one that examines, revises and renews the relations between all the actions listed above. A designer is capable of thinking through this mode of design-ing. Every time a designer challenges him/herself to create a new spatial concept s/he philosophises. A spatial concept, after all, is an eternally playful and transforming mix of words, vectors and planes, and sometimes poetry lies between the written text and the graphic lines.

Love for Creating Concepts
Again, philosophy is the love for knowledge. But more than just a love of knowledge, it’s a love to challenge ourselves to create new knowledge, just like how the design process can challenge us on how else we might think about space and its production. If philosophy and design are to be interlocutors then they together have the capacity to crack apart established grounds to allow new strata to surface.

How do we start to crack open established grounds to beget new grounds? An interdisciplinary approach to design-ing may be a start. And it might be even more productive if we deliberately situate ourselves in tensional and uncomfortable positions. Here is a hypothetical example: We may start with books that do not immediately pertain to site-planning, public amenities delivery or land economics. We may start with books that question and challenge what is family, individual, nationality, community and so on, concepts that are not immediately within the ‘normal’ professional practice of architecture or physical urban planning. In fact, some of these books may even refuse to give us clear definitions of what is the family, nation, community or individual. So, if the notion of community, for instance, is irreducible to geographic limits, then how would a community centre respond to a community that is perhaps as elusive as identities on the Internet? Likewise, how do we design for families that are not the traditional family?

In the abovementioned example what started off as mere theoretical debates about the nature of community, individual, nation or family can in fact have spatial impacts. New spatial concepts and practices have to be crafted to engage with non-geographic communities and post-traditional families. The task of philosophy, social philosophy in this case, is not to give architects, planners and landscape architects the blueprint or datum line on how to physically design such post-local community centres or family housing for non-traditional families. The task is to supply conceptual, textual and socio-political forces to complement and transform the designer’s practice of creating concepts, spatial or otherwise.

To conclude, we may turn to Gilles Deleuze’s words on creating concepts:

Concepts do not exist ready-made in a kind of heaven waiting for some philosopher [or designer] to come grab them. Concepts have to be produced.[3]

Philosophical questions will be asked of these spatial practices, and spatial questions will be asked of philosophy. Philosophy becomes spatial; spatial practices reveal their philosophical dimension. Philosophy is made in space.




[1] Kees Dorst (2006), Understanding Design: 175 Reflections on being a designer, Corte Madera, CA: Gingko Press, p.64. Dorst wrote that while rules of thumb have served the design professions very well over the centuries, it is still important to notice when we are using them and query why they work for certain circumstances and not others. Putting rules of thumb through an analytical sieve, knowing how the components that make up a rule of thumb relate to each other and how they relate to things external to them will make it easier for us to break them when necessary.  
[2] Raymond Williams (1983) Keywords: A vocabulary of culture and society, New York City: Fontana Press, p.318.  For Williams, praxis is a moment when “practice is informed by theory” and simultaneously “theory is informed by practice.” The potency of revolutionary moves is achieved by consciously maintaining the two as a single action.
[3]Gilles Deleuze (2006), Two Regimes of Madness, p.314