Architecture in the Penumbra

This paper addresses the overarching issues concerning architectural ways to knowledge, and, the forms in which these investigations can be captured and described. To this end, we wish to provide an account of some tenets in our ongoing practice, by reporting on a collaborative and interdisciplinary enterprise, between architecture and the social sciences, that has sought to dually advance and explicate research in architecture. We start out by focusing on the very notion of knowledge and how it could be alternately construed to better provide for a study of architectural sensibilities. We will then briefly delineate the target of research, occupying the space between representations and their material actualizations. By departing from the ubiquity of algorithmic design tools and fabrication technologies the explorations have taken an interest in capturing qualities that lie outside the realm of computational control. The results of these investigations are then discussed against the backdrop of two different projects—Aqueotrope and Vector Interference II. Finally, we turn to a discussion on how it is possible to analyze and describe architectural research in terms that preserve, without distortion, the discipline’s internal criteria for descriptive adequacy—proposing a form of research that aims to provide endogenous accounts of its own methodic practices.

Volume Editors
David Ruy & Lola Sheppard

ISBN
978-0-935502-95-4